Children and Young Mental Health

The purpose of our Children and Young People’s Mental Health workstream is to bring our partners together to work towards a whole-systems approach designed to reduce waiting times and ensuring that young people are seen by the right service at the right time. 

As part of our partnership working, we have set up a Children’s and Young People Mental Health Partnership Group (CYPPG). The CYPPG brings together key managers to discuss and work together for CYP mental health. The purpose of the CYPPG is to ensure that the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in Hounslow is in line with the principles and objectives of the Hounslow Borough Based Partnership. The CYPPG will collaboratively manage local projects to meet agreed milestones, targets and objectives to improve treatment and care for children and young people.

Return to School – delivered by Positive Support Group Consultancy

Return to School is a positive behavioural outreach service that aims to stabilise the education provision for CYP at risk of education breakdown and/or support CYP who have been out of school. This will include providing direct assessment and support to the CYP, their families, and those in their network. This service will identify and mitigate barriers, build resilience, and increase understanding of the CYP’s unique needs. This service will support the development of a more consistent high-quality SEND support offer for Hounslow’s mainstream schools as well as reducing inappropriate referrals to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and prevent costs in specialist and crisis pathways.

Hounslow Family Support Pilot – delivered by Contact

This pilot project would provide direct advice and support to 150 families over one year via group sessions and 1:2:1 advice. This would be separate from the existing Contact Helping Hand Project and would include families of children 0-25 with any type of additional need and/or disability, with no requirement for diagnosis. Hounslow currently has a significant level of unmet parental support need. We have received feedback through the existing Contact project, our SEND engagement forum, and through parents’ involvement in Care, Education and Treatment Reviews, that parents do not feel embedded in and supported by their local communities. Many parents do not know other families with children with SEND, and feel that having early support from professionals, which connects them with similar families, would prevent escalation of their child’s behaviours further down the line.

Youth & Family Service – delivered by Centre for ADHD & Autism Support (CAAS)

The funding will provide a part time Youth and Schools Support Worker (YSSW) to work in three secondary schools. The service will provide one to one support for three ASD and/or ADHD students each day as an individual session or as a small group session. As part the of service, coffee drop-in sessions or meetings with parents and/or carers will be provided to support them in the care of their child in need. CAAS will deliver training support sessions with school staff members (including SEND team). This will be in the form of Question and Answer (Q & A) sessions, separate meetings, or breakfast teacher discussions to raise awareness of ASD and ADHD. A Family Support Worker will also be recruited to the service to offer appointments for parent/carer to explore their feelings around the diagnosis of ADHD and ASD and answer any questions or concerns the parent/carer may have.

So far, this has involved mapping all our existing services, and encouraging partners to think evaluatively about the challenges they face within the current system. Through this exercise, we have identified six main challenges and areas for improvement: 

• Staffing: improve recruitment and retention
• Communication with schools and capacity challenges
• Communication amongst the whole network surrounding a child
• Waiting times
• Increasing complexity of need amongst young people
• Increased volume of referrals

In order to reduce waiting times and improve outcomes for our young people, we are currently working towards submitting transformative business cases for funding to implement new services and extend our existing services, once these have been approved our project objectives will be available to all BBP staff.