News

Our Drayton Park women’s crisis house and resource centre started December by celebrating three decades of providing trauma-informed care and treatment for service users, offering safety and compassion for women needing support with their mental health.

With a full afternoon’s programme for the Friday 12 December event, designed by service users and staff in partnership – in line with Drayton Park’s overall ethos of working in partnership with its service users – the 30^th birthday celebration saw patients and professionals come together to give thanks for the work delivered since the centre opened in 1995.

Creativity and compassion combined

With service users sharing poetry they had crafted as part of their care and recovery, music and songs performed by a combined group of service users and music therapy charity partners, and a buffet of homecooked food by Drayton Park’s own team, the celebration saw dozens of staff from all through the service’s history visiting to help mark the 30^th anniversary milestone.

Shirley McNicholas, who played a central role in establishing Drayton Park in the 1990s and remains one of the team managers at the facility, shared her gratitude to all the people who have helped make the service what it is and what it has been, to so many women over its history.

Shirley said: It’s a privilege to welcome so many people to Drayton Park to mark its 30^th anniversary. It seems both a long time ago and just last week that we were racing to put together the bid for funding to open Drayton Park, and it’s an honour that some of the staff who worked here back when we first opened have travelled so far to be part of our 30^th celebration. Every one of our staff from clinical practitioners like Georgia to Vera, our domestic, plays a unique role in making this service what it is, and it is an honour to see, hear and feel how valued Drayton Park is by the women who use it.”

Find more information about Drayton Park on North London NHS Foundation Trust’s website, including signposting to peer-reviewed studies of the care model Drayton Park’s service is based on.