I’m Karen Prince and I am a Family and Systemic Psychotherapist - often known as a Family Therapist and a qualified Association for Family Therapy (AFT) accredited systemic supervisor in the Eating Disorder Service (EDS).
Can you tell us a bit about the service you work in?
The EDS is an all age community service that works with people suffering a variety of different eating disorders including anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder and other specific feeding or eating disorder (OSFED).
Eating disorders are a life threatening and life limiting illness and an area of practice where physical and psychological are intertwined. To create safety, to share risk and plan together, each of the five teams covering the area of Lancashire and South Cumbria take a multi-disciplinary team (MDT) approach. The teams include multiple professional roles that can offer different perspectives and expertise.
What does an average day look like for you as a family therapist?
Each day in the life of a Family Therapist in EDS brings new experiences, challenges, learning and opportunities. This role offers a wide variety of opportunities to work with multiple complex systems be that individuals, families, teams, services and organisations.
The variety of the role means each day looks different. Within a working day I will attend a MDT meeting, connect with families to offer therapeutic interventions, deliver supervision and offer consultations. I predominately work on the children and young people’s pathway that gives me the space to be collaboratively creative within a theoretically rigorous, evidence based framework.
A family approach has the greatest evidence base in this area of clinical practice and we look to offer timely and responsive interventions. The clinical work involves providing specialist ED focused intervention of family therapy for anorexia nervosa/ family therapy for bulimia nervosa (FTAN/FTBN) to families.
Additionally I offer therapy to complex family systems and include and support key professionals involved in the family’s lives to support the recovery journey.
We have developed a carers group as we recognise the need to support loved ones throughout the journey of recovery.
In your experience what impact can family therapists have on delivering high quality health care?
There are many examples of working in the team that supports the role of a family therapist making a difference and contributing to recovery and change. From delivering training and providing supervision which sees interventions being delivered to a high standard to a young person reaching their goals and moving forward in their lives.
In all aspects of my systemic work I will be using key systemic skills and techniques to generate uncomfortable and relationally risky conversation that are required to support change. These conversations might be between family members or clinicians and within and between teams/services and within the different levels of the organisation.
