What Makes What’s Up Special?
Focus on Children and Young People
- What’s Up’s counselling services are specifically
targeted at children, particularly 7-12 year olds. This group
is currently seriously under-served by all other mental health
services and not addressed by any other professional telephone
counselling service.
- What’s Up focuses on early intervention with every-day
problems affecting younger children.
- Market research was conducted with over 700 school-age New Zealanders.
They made clear suggestions as to how the service should be presented
and gave the name to the service - What's Up?…Help
for young New Zealanders.
Professionalism
- The service is staffed by appropriately paid, professional counsellors.
Rigorous staff selection, training and employment processes, competitive
remuneration structures for counselling staff, and sound accountability
and performance management systems build strong foundations for
service quality and quality assurance.
- This enables delivery of consistently high-quality counselling
and supervisory standards.
- The service is benchmarked with the operating policies and standards
of Kids Help Line in Australia, (www.kidshelp.com.au)
which has provided similar services to Australian children since
1991.
Business stability
- The Kids Help Foundation Trust and What’s Up are run according
to rigorous business management principles and procedures with
stable personnel, resources and sponsor-funded marketing.
- What’s Up was launched with a strong campaign that included
the distribution of 1.03 million stickers and pamphlets to 41,000
classrooms in schools throughout New Zealand, extensive TV and
print media advertising aimed at both adults and children, and
media briefings, interviews and press releases.
- Highly professional and focussed marketing campaigns will continue
in conjunction with our corporate sponsors.
- What's Up is offered in association with Barnardos
New Zealand.
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- The service is associated with a positive, friendly, supportive
approach ("call us with any issue") rather than a problem-focused,
serious-issues-only connotation.
- This promotes opportunities for early-intervention, more appropriate
to a telephone-based service, rather than "ambulance at the
bottom of the cliff" responses.
Technology
Technology developed and refined by Kids Help Line in Australia
provides What’s Up counsellors with:
- exceptional ability to provide callers with information about
screened and targeted resources in their home area.
- on-the-spot expertise of senior counselling staff to assist
with management of the call at hand and debriefing following difficult
encounters with clients.
- In addition What's Up will be developing web-based counselling,
which will be unique to this service in New Zealand.
Funding
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