Spotlight on Staff: Isobel Heyman

What's your job role and why are you excited for this new hospital?

My name is Isobel, and I'm a doctor, a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist. I'm really excited about the Cambridge Children's Hospital project because it's a brand new hospital which is completely pulling together physical and mental health, making sure that they're as important as each other. That's an area I've spent my whole career thinking about and working on.

It's always been difficult for me to understand why physical health and mental health have been so separated. They're funded separately. The hospitals are separate. But actually almost everybody who has a physical health problem has got wellbeing and psychological needs, and vice versa. If you've got mental ill health, you're likely to need to have some of your physical care looked after. Generally, I think it'd be true to say that mental health is the poorer neighbour, gets the worst deal, gets a little bit left behind, so I think it's brilliant that in Cambridge we're putting the two on exactly the same footing.

We're going to make sure everybody has a level of screening to make sure that if they have got existing mental health needs, they're detected and they're given the best possible treatments. But the whole ethos of the hospital is that psychological wellbeing will be on everybody's agenda, it will be everybody's business to think about the needs of not just the patient, but their parents, their siblings, their broader network, and to really make sure we think about the whole child.

How is the hospital going to battle the stigma surrounding some diagnoses?

Stigma, in association with mental health, is a really big problem. I think it's fair to say it's got a bit less in the last decades with a lot of celebrities revealing their own mental health issues over the years, people being more able to speak out, boys and men being able to reflect more on their mental ill health, but it still remains a really difficult set of problems for lots of people to talk about.

I think one of the side effects of stigma is that sometimes mental illness doesn't get treated as seriously as physical illness, that standards of care can be more patchy across services in terms of getting the best possible treatment for your condition. Fully integrating physical and mental health care will pull everything up to a higher standard. We'll expect exactly the same high quality care for people with mental illness and they'll be sharing spaces with children who have also got physical illness, so we really hope that whether you've got a physical health need or a mental health need, you're just a young person who needs help and support at this time in your life and there will be no difference between them, which I think will have a powerful impact on stigma.

How are you planning to introduce animals into the care and recovery of patients within the hospital?

I'm really glad you've asked me about animals because it's a topic really dear to my heart. I've had dogs for many years and they've often accompanied me into the clinic to meet some of my patients and families and, particularly in my work, children who sometimes don't like talking to other humans very much, or are a bit nervous or anxious, will relax and engage when there's a dog in the room. From my own personal experience it's been amazing being able to share my dog with people.

More broadly, when we were gathering ideas for the hospital, particularly from children and families, there was so much interest in having therapy animals involved. Some children even wondered, could we have a farm? Could we have chickens and have our own eggs? The sky is the limit, in some ways! I think we may not quite run to having a market garden and a farm but I think we are really thinking broadly about the outdoors, about nature, about food, about animals, and I think all these are really, really important parts of wellbeing and recovery.