Being Healthy | Capstone Foster Care Agency

  • Carers are assessed using the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) at the outset of the Form F process to determine their capacity for offering themselves as a secure attachment figure to a child in their care
     
  • Carers are also assessed for quality of lifestyle, incorporating good diet and access to exercise. We encourage an awareness of substances that could cause difficulties for children, e.g. additives
     
  • Carers try to find some physical activity that children placed with them can access and enjoy, e.g. children with disorganised attachment who can’t do team games go swimming instead, and are given bicycles, skateboards or mountain boards. Children who have suffered very early trauma and therefore have poor motor skills will go swimming, rock climbing, horse riding. Carers understand that one of the ways of healing trauma is by creating a physical rhythm which serves to relax chronic tense muscle tone
     
  • Young people are discouraged from smoking. Carers who smoke do so away from central living areas and children under five can’t be placed with them (this is partly because the effects of passive smoking are greater in younger children & because carers spend more time in close proximity to small children.)
     
  • The Capstone service includes assessment for and provision of therapy. The impact of trauma is extensive and most young people placed have some health issues – attachment disorders, depression, PTSD, psychogenic autism
     
  • Capstone provides a range of therapies as varied as the children’s needs. We have a team of therapists who work from our offices – child psychotherapists, play therapists and family therapists – who are focused on enabling a child to rewrite their life narrative and move forward. The models of therapy we use are dictated by the children’s needs and we currently use the Dan Hughes’ attachment model, as well as CBT and psychodynamic models
     
  • Whatever programme of work is set up, it’s accomplished in partnership with carers. Attachment disorders are the outcome of sustained early neglect and/or abuse and our approach is one that recognises that the child’s greatest need is for secure attachment. The obvious attachment figure is the carer and so carers are consulted and engaged in every aspect of the therapeutic process
     
  • Capstone also offers counselling or therapy to carers who may, in the process of intensive engagement with an attachment-disordered child, experience secondary traumatic stress disorder (STSD). This caring-for-carers reflects Capstone’s concern with the over-all quality of care; if carers feel secure and nurtured by the Capstone family ethos, they are better resourced in their own caring task