How Godfrey Care transformed one young person’s journey from long-term hospital care to a thriving life in the community.
At Godfrey Care, we believe deeply that every person—whatever their circumstances—deserves access to support that can give them a bridge to better mental health and empower them to build a future with a better quality of life.
For some individuals, that bridge feels impossibly out of reach. Many have spent years in hospital settings, their lives shaped by restrictive environments that are often more about containment than empowerment. Godfrey Care have become specialists in helping individuals to overcome these challenges: with the right therapeutic approach, skilled multidisciplinary teams, and truly bespoke environments, even the most complex transitions can be successful.
One such transition—a 17-year-old young person who had spent a quarter of his life detained under the Mental Health Act— demonstrates how our specialist collaboration, creativity, and care transformed his future.
A Bespoke Therapeutic Environment
This forward-thinking project began with one simple but powerful mission: to place the young person’s needs, preferences, and potential at the centre of everything.
Working closely with the Local Authority and Integrated Care Board, we co-produced a safe, nurturing, and highly personalised environment that would enable a supported move from a secure hospital to community-based residential care.
Every detail was planned in deep collaboration with health and social care professionals, ensuring that sensory, emotional, and developmental needs were met. Over a structured 12-week transition period, hospital staff and our team worked side by side to build familiarity, trust, and confidence, step by step.
Early Impact: Creating Space for Growth
The support team focused on removing the need for restrictive physical interventions through rapport and relationship building, having the individual’s needs met by people who work tirelessly to understand who they are as a person, and not the label of “a child with challenging behaviour.”
The results of the careful planning and preparation of the environment and support were both immediate and profound.
After moving into his new environment, the young person presented with significantly reduced risk behaviours and began forming positive relationships with his new staff team. He was especially receptive to female staff—something that had not been possible for many years—and started accepting medication and support from them.
Importantly, he was also able to spend more time with his family, rebuilding connections that became a meaningful part of his progress.
A Transformative Journey
When the young person arrived with us in September 2024, he came by secure hospital transport, reflecting years of intensive, hospital-based care. By June 2025, his achievements speak for themselves:
- Discharged from Section 3 of the Mental Health Act and fully stepped down from the Intensive Support Team.
- Welcomed female staff and his mum into his environment for the first time in years.
- Re-engaged with education, showing remarkable ability and enthusiasm in Maths and English, as well as other areas of learning.
- Planned, prepared, and started cooking his own meals, enjoying the health benefits and independence this brings.
- Reduced from a crisis team of 11 clinical staff in hospital to a tailored 3:1 community support package, on his own terms, with further reductions planned.
- Learned coping strategies and functional communication skills, eliminating the need for PRN medications.
- Removed restrictive physical interventions entirely, thanks to trust-based relationships and staff who saw him as a person, not a label.
This case is more than a success story. It’s a blueprint for compassionate, creative, and highly specialised approaches. It epitomises our values of being innovative, inclusive, and resilient in support of some of the most complex mental health transitions in the system. It also demonstrates that when teams come together—sharing expertise, resources, and a singular focus on quality of life—young people who were once considered “too complex” for community living can flourish.
At Godfrey Care, we are proud to play a part in rewriting these stories. We don’t just build placements. We build futures, together.
If you’d like to learn more about how Godfrey Care can support complex transitions from hospital to community settings, get in touch with our team for a conversation:
Call 01332 419150 or email referrals@godfreycare.co.uk
