Live Chat – Listening Ear
Welcome to Kelly’s Heroes Listening Ear, a free emotional support service for anyone who feels they need someone to listen to them.
Our service is supported by real people, not chatbots, so trained listeners are available every evening from 6pm – every single day. Look for the pink button at the bottom right of your screen.
When you engage in a LIVE CHAT, we won’t burden you with unnecessary questions. If you wish to share your details, you can, but rest assured, the service is completely confidential.
Your messages to us are kept strictly confidential unless we believe there’s an imminent safety concern. In such cases, our supervisor will conduct a dynamic risk assessment and may share details with emergency services to ensure your safety.
For more information, feel scroll down to explore our FAQ section.
FAQ’s
Kelly’s Heroes Listening Ear is a confidential support service.
This means unless our support worker has real concerns about (your) the caller’s safety, your conversation remains private and confidential. Your chat history can be viewed by our supervisor for training purposes and safety.
If the support worker believes that (your) the caller’s life or a child is in danger or at risk of immediate harm, our supervisor will complete a dynamic risk assessment. This may result in your known details being shared with emergency services or authorities for a wellbeing check. We will always be honest with you, and whenever possible inform you of any actions we take, the focus being your safety and well-being, keeping you safe always.
Our support workers are trained active listeners, and it is important you know you can talk to use about anything that feels important to you and that is preventing you from living a full and meaningful happy life. We do not judge. Using empathic techniques and establish your presenting issues, we are here to support you and help you to de-escalate from what may be a difficult moment in time to a place where recovery and safety planning can be reached.
Our support workers understand mental health concerns, these may include callers feeling anxious, stressed, bereaved, isolated or lonely. You can trust us to explore any suicidal ideologies you may be experiencing, and we will always aim to support you in the best possible way.
It is important to us that you have time to explore your reasons for calling in a safe manner. We will let you know if we are nearing the ending of our opening times.
Our calls vary in length of time, if at any point you want to leave the call, you can just enter STOP and our support worker will end the chat.
In order to make the service available to everyone, we may at busy times, set a maximum time duration per call.
Our team of support workers all receive the same high-level training to listen and support you, offering where appropriate advice and guidance.
What we do not claim to be are experts, nor do we offer diagnoses. We believe you are the expert in your own life, so we are here to support you in your time of need.
Our support workers all work different shifts and are made up of different ages and genders but we all offer the same type of support, so regardless who you speak to, you will receive the same empathic and caring support.
We may ask you a number of short questions. This information helps us to identify who is using our services and helps us to understand how we can evolve to support more people and identify what groups may need more help.
We are not connected to the NHS Services and are not a Mental Health CRISIS service. If you feel in immediate danger, we always recommend you call 999.
For Northamptonshire residents, the NHS NHFT offer a direct number to the Mental Health Hub which is open every day 24/7 – 0800 448 0828
OR you can call the Samaritans on 116 123 any day any time.
OR You can have an online chat with ChildLine by visiting www.childline.org.uk or by calling them on 0800 11 11. ChildLine are available 24 hours per day.
We also have a list of local and national resources list available on our website. Please visit the Help & Advice section.
Listening Ear is an emotional support service, to help you in a moment of Crisis or when you are feeling in a difficult place and struggling to cope. It is designed to de-escalate, and we may not be able to offer you long term continuous support with the same worker, so it is not the same as counselling, but we understand why it may feel similar.
Kelly’s Heroes do offer a free and low-rate cost counselling service for anyone affected by poor mental health, the links are available on our website.
We anonymise all data from conversations to study the wellbeing of our community and evaluate our own performances. Individual conversations will never be shared. Data will be collated to help us plan our expansion and develop the service.
We provide a feedback service, so callers can send us feedback which we may share on our performance reviews and social media sites, these will always be anonymised.
In the event of a safeguarding concern, our supervisor who oversees all conversations may share details with the emergency services.
Our team of support workers have all been recruited because of their skillset, valuable experiences and caring qualities, essential to the nature of our service. All on-line conversations and staff are supervised by a supervisor who has extensive crisis intervention experience.
The well-being of our team at Kelly’s Heroes is critical to our services, and we pride ourselves on promoting mental health and wellbeing in the workplace.