News at Xen

Our online counselling service for young people wins Local Government IT Excellence Award

Kooth, our pioneering advice and support service for 11-25 year olds, received the Local Government IT Excellence Award for Service Transformation at the Society of Information Technology Management (Socitm) Annual Conference last week in Newport.

The Kooth service helps vulnerable young people deal with a wide range of problems from alcohol and drug misuse through to bullying and depression. The free, confidential and anonymous service is staffed by a team of specially trained counsellors and advice workers, who also fully moderate the site checking the suitability of all the user-created content to make sure Kooth.com remains a safe site for young people to use.

The Local Government IT Excellence awards are the result of collaboration between Intellect, Socitm and SOLACE. Now in their 13th year, they seek to highlight and reward IT systems or processes within local government which improve the efficiency and delivery of services within local communities.

Elaine Bousfield, Kooth Service Director, said: “We are extremely proud of Kooth and how it has broken the stigma for the young people we have worked with surrounding mental and emotional health. This award strengthens our desire for Kooth.com to one day be a national service so that young people from all over the UK can access advice and counselling from the medium they are growing up with which is the Internet.”

Councillor Mark Weldon, Executive Member for Children & Young People, at Stockport Council, said: "Kooth.com continues to go from strength to strength. This innovative public/private partnership rightly receives the national accolades for the difference it makes to young people when they need advice and support."

Partnerships With Indian IT Companies Can Offer A Competitive Advantage To UK Small Businesses

I, and my colleagues from the the Intellect-NASSCOM   Partnership Programme delegation, returned to the UK last week hugely impressed with the health of the Indian Emerging IT sector and excited about the partnering opportunities available. The weeklong mission was kindly sponsored by the South East Media Network, UK Trade and Invest and the UK India Business Council and was the first initiative in a partnership programme which aims to increase trade between the UK and India – click here for more information.

We received a warm and enthusiastic welcome everywhere we went. The itinery for the week was as follows.

 
• Day 1 was in Banagalore and took the form of a series of one-to-one meetings with Indian IT companies at a networking event organised by NASSCOM in the afternoon and a reception organised by the British High Commission in the evening.
     
• Day 2 included visits to the facilities of three larger companies based in Bangalore – namely, MindTree, iflex and Mphasis
     
• Freetime in the morning on day 3 enabled us to have follow-up meetings with some of the companies we had met on Monday. We flew to Delhi in the afternoon.   
     
• Day 4 was a series of visits to the offices of some of the larger IT companies     in Delhi, namely HCL, Nucleus Software and Headstrong
     
• The final day was a reception at NASSCOM’s offices in Delhi and a series of one-to-one meetings with Indian IT companies based in the capital.
   

The kind of partnership opportunities explored by the UK delegation included:   

 
• Outsourcing of software/web development and IT services
 
• Business and knowledge and process outsourcing
 
• Strategic consulting 
 
• Selling into the Indian market
 
• Assistance with UK Market Entry (for example, sales/marketing execution and resourcing)

A significant degree of momentum was generated during the week with, for example, a number of follow-up meetings scheduled to take place in London in the coming weeks in order to continue the discussion started in India. Some members of the UK delegation even said they were planning or making significant changes to their business plans in order to maximise on the opportunities they identified during the week. Additionally, the UK companies identified synergies and ways that they could partner and do business together.

Next steps for the partnership programme include: 

• Developing plans to publicise the success of the trip to other UK SMEs
• The creation of a forum to exchange experiences and learnings 
• A return visit, with Indian IT companies visiting the UK for a week in April/May 2008

The UK delegation comprised:

 
• Arjun Chatterji, Managing Director, Playmetv
 
• Gina Fegan, CEO, South East Media Network
 
• John Gavin, Managing Director, G4h
 
• Keith Dewar,Managing Director, SBA
 
• Nigel Hartnell, Corporate Development Director, Ffastfill (also Chairman SEMN and of Intellect’s Software Group)
 
• Phil Rice, CTO, Erudine
 
• Dr Richard Sykes, Sole Partner and also Chairman of Intellect’s Outsourcing & Offshore Group
 
• Steve Roche, Director, Xenzone
 
• Tom Wills-Sandford, Deputy Director General, Intellect

On behalf of the rest of the UK delegation, I’d like to say a huge thank you to all our hosts at the company visits and the business people we met at the one-to-one meetings. We were very impressed with the degree of professionalism and the level of hospitality offered. We should also thank Tom Wills-Sandford from Intellect for initiating the partnership programme and giving us the opportunity to be part of the pilot event, Avinash Raghava and the rest of the NASSCOM team for organising things in India, the British High Commission, the programme sponsors and, of course, everyone that we met in India for making us so welcome.

Steve Roche

Xenzone is selected to travel on mission to India

Steve Roche, Director of Xenzone, will travel to India on 5 January as part of a delegation with aim of forming partnerships with Indian companies.

Intellect, the South East Media Network and NASSCOM selected the company as part of a competition to find five UK technology SMEs to travel to India to enable them to exploit opportunities in the Indian and UK IT markets.

This mission is a pilot for the Intellect-NASSCOM Partnership Programme and the objective is that the pilot will trigger continuing engagement between Indian and UK IT SMEs for the benefit of both sides. The mission will start in Bangalore on January 7th & 8th 2008 with introductory sessions, company visits and networking meetings with Bangalore based and other SMEs and conclude in Delhi at the end of that week on January 11.

Launch of the new Xenzone corporate website

Today sees the launch of our new website - Xenzone.com - and our new strapline - The Leaders In Online Therapy.

It better reflects the full range of products and services we offer and demonstrates our commitment to remain at the forefront of the service we pioneered in the UK - online therapy.

We welcome any feedback.

Kooth receives a Highly Commended accolade at the Positive Practice Awards

For the second year running our online counselling and rapid referral service for young people, Kooth, was nominated for an award at the CSIP Positive Practice Awards 2007.

And for the second year running Kooth received a Highly Commended recognition by the judges in the Children and Young People category. Our congratulations to the winners - the Breakthrough Mentoring Project.

Maybe next year ... !

 

We'll be at Community Care Live on 11 October 2007

If you plan to attend the Community Care Live exhibition at the London Business Design Centre in Islington in October then please come and meet us at stand number 70.

We will be showcasing our Early Intervention and Rapid Referral Service, Kooth.com, on the day.

The event is the best social care conference and exhibition of the year. The comprehensive, one day event offers  a cutting edge, highly topical conference programme and interactive workshops - plus, this year, a chance for you to meet the Xenzone and Kooth.com teams! It would be good to see you there. 

You can register to attend Community Care Live by clicking here.

New research supports Internet chat room therapy

We came across an interesting piece of academic research recently which supports our own findings that online approaches to therapy produce positive results. The study was conducted by researchers at Heidelberg University. They concluded that mental health treatment based on the use of Internet chat after inpatient care reduces the risk of losing the therapeutic benefits achieved during the inpatient treatment.

The groups that were the focus for the research met weekly for over three months for 90 minutes each time. The main criterion was derived from comprehensive assessments of changes in health status comprising the psychological and physical condition of the patients. The researchers said that the low dropout rate and the high session attendance supported the expectation that this way of providing aftercare met patient needs. They said it opens a new avenue for the optimisation of care for patients with mental disorders.

We know from our own experience of working online with young people on the Kooth.com service and from the formal evaluation that has been conducted into the service, that it is possible to form therapeutic relationships with clients online and positive outcomes can be achieved. Young people, perhaps in particular, are comfortable with new technology and, because of the anonymity that the Internet can offer, open up in ways that they do not always do in face-to-face situations. The accessibility of the Internet also makes it possible to deliver a therapeutic service outside of normal hours and to people who cannot always travel to a physical location.

New-look Kooth.com website launches

Our online counselling website, Kooth.com, was relaunched on Monday 13 August with a new look. The new site builds on the simple look so favoured by young people these days as demonstrated by websites such as MySpace, Bebo and YouTube.

Now operating in half a dozen local authority areas in North West England, the Kooth service helps young people deal with a wide range of problems from alcohol and drug misuse through to bullying and depression.

Elaine Bousfield, Service Director of Kooth.com: “As we always do, we carried out a lot of research and consultation with end-users and what came out of that was a call from the young people we work with to give the site a more modest and clean design. The tastes of young people have moved on since we first launched the Kooth.com service in 2004 and we’ve reflected that in the new-look Kooth plus we’ve improved the usability and the accessibility of the site generally.”

Children to get cash boost over the next 3 years

The government is planning to open an extra 2,175 Sure Start children’s centres by 2010. The initiative is aimed at encouraging disadvantaged families to make use of parenting support other services such as maternity checks, childcare and advice on getting work.

The £4 billion project will also fund training and support for the early year’s workforce as the government wants to make sure there are sufficient childcare places in each local authority.

The investment will bring the number of children’s centres in the UK up to 3.500. £175m of the investment is planned to support voluntary, private and independent providers of early education and childcare.

Tackling the problem of homophobic bullying

One of the presenting problems we're seeing increasingly on Kooth.com is hostile and offensive action towards lesbian, gay and bisexual young people by their peers. Homophobic bullying takes many forms ranging from verbal, physical or emotional harassment through to offensive graffiti, humiliation and threats.

Many young people get a sense that they are lesbian, gay or bisexual early on and they can find it hard to admit their sexuality. Bullying from school friends and family members makes matters worse. Although the DFES issued statutory guidelines in 2000 which stated that schools need to be able to deal with homophobic bullying, we're finding that the anonymous nature and 24/7 availability of the online counselling service we offer at Kooth, can provide a form of support which young people appreciate. We're able to support young people in a way that supplements the help they receive from statutory and specialist organisations.