Mental Health – Five Year Forward View

We are now some way into the timeframe of the government’s  “Five Year Forward View for Mental Health, a £1bn plan to improve mental health care by 2021” and one of the areas under close scrutiny is the treatment of children.

A recent Care Quality Commission (CQC) report says that some children with severe mental health issues are waiting up to 18 months to be treated. There is concern that those who work with children and young people – whether in schools, GP practices or hospital A&E teams – sometimes lack the skills to identify and support children with mental health needs, hindering their access to specialist help. Another independent report suggests that Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) turns away nearly a quarter of children referred to them for treatment by concerned parents, GPs and others.

Claire Murdoch, Mental Health Director for NHS England, said in a statement following the publishing of the CQC report: “Without a doubt, after years of drought, the NHS’s mental health funding taps have now been turned on. It’s going to take years of concerted practical effort to solve these service gaps, even with new money, given the time it inescapably takes to train the extra child psychiatrists, therapists and nurses required.”

Asked to comment on the shortcomings highlighted by the CQC, she said CAMHS services were improving “but from a starting point of historic underfunding and legacy understaffing, relative to rapidly growing need”.

She added: “The CQC rightly acknowledge that the NHS’s five-year plan for mental health, developed with patients, their families, health professionals and other partners, sets out a clear route map for improvement and investment, and progress is under way. As we look out over the next few years, the CQC is also right to highlight better cross-sector working involving health providers, schools, regulators and government, as well as children and parents, if we’re to put in place care which is timely, supportive and of the highest quality.”

As the NHS struggles to cope with demand, police forces across the country have reported a rise in the number of mental health related incidents they deal with. The Metropolitan Police, Britain’s biggest police force, received a phone call relating to mental health every five minutes last year. The numbers have risen by nearly a third since 2011-12 and are now at record levels. A PC who has had regular dealings with issues surrounding mental health said that the amount of time he spends dealing with mental health calls has noticeably increased. “The police are picking up the slack from other services,” he says. “If people have nowhere else to turn to, they call us.”

Amanda Cavanagh, a medical negligence specialist at Ashtons Legal, says: “There are clear benefits in utilising the skills of professionals who deal with children in seeking referrals, but if the referral goes unheeded then where do desperate families turn? If they do not get the care in time the situation can so quickly become a tragic statistic, where it is too late to save a child from self-harm or, worse, suicide.”