Zest - Healing the Hurt Ltd

Public benefits

All our work falls within item 4 of the description of charitable purposes: "The advancement of health or the saving of lives", in that we provide counselling services, both therapeutic and complementary, aimed at saving and protecting the lives of those in danger. The direct benefit of what we do is that service users engage personally with the

counselling service so that there is a direct improvement in their mental health resulting among other things in an increased ability to work which advances the prevention or relief from poverty as an incidental benefit.This direct benefit is evidenced by the evaluation work we perform on each service user. We use the CORE evaluation system which measures the mental health risks and status of the service user before and after treatment and the statistical results of this evaluation are supplied to the PHA on a regular basis.Based on our work to date for the PHA our service users show overall a statistically significant improvement in their mental health as a result of our work. The indirect benefit of our work is a reduction of the re-admissions to hospitals by our service users following an incident of suicidal or self-harming behaviour due to the improvement in their mental health status resulting in doctors and hospitals having more free time and space to deal with waiting list reduction which is a general benefit to the wider population. This is evidenced by the fact that PHA have renewed all our contracts each year for the last 5 years as a result of the improvements in the levels of re-admissions to hospitals each year. The wider benefit to the community at large is that the improvement in health of the population of our direct service users and the general population benefits with increased access and availability of health care facilities.

What your organisation does

We provide counselling service to persons in distress as a result of self-harm or suicidal thoughts and this service is extended to friends and family of those in distress. We also provide training sessions on suicide and self-harm awareness.