Helping us to Improve Support for Children and Young People with Mental Health Difficulties

NHS North East Lincolnshire CCG recently involved members of the local community in redesigning Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) for young people in our area.

As with any change to local support, the CCG wanted to hear about the experiences of young people, their families and those with an interest in mental health, and understand what they found most important in the existing service and what they would like to see happen differently.

As part of this process, community forum representatives (pictured right), Barry Osbourne (Community Representative for Mental Health and Disability) and Pam Taylor (Community Representative for Women and Children’s Services) were actively involved in the engagement to ensure the views of families, carers, stakeholders and most importantly, children and young people informed the specification for the redesigned service.

Evaluating the feedback

The CCG received a huge amount of feedback, through online surveys, focus groups and even an Easter fun day with a Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing theme.

People told us things like:

  • “more support is needed at school"
  • “there needs to be more self-help equipment available including a website so that young people can go there for advice 24/7”
  • “a ‘Passport’ approach should be used for transitioning so that Children and Young people only need to tell their story once”.

What have we done with the feedback?

A team of community and CCG staff have collated and listened to all of the feedback, suggestions and comments and this has shaped our service specification. This feedback has determined the necessary specification and is a THRIVE model. This means it is a person-centred, whole system approach that focuses on early intervention, prevention and building resilience.

Next steps

The feedback has been evaluated and the service specification written. The service will be going out to tender which means we will ask organisations who are interested in providing this service to make a bid.