Agenda item
Emotional and Mental Health of Looked After Children
This item will be a presentation during the meeting.
Minutes:
This report provided information to the Council’s Corporate Parenting Committee (CPC) about services available for the emotional and mental health needs of Looked After Children.
Duncan Ambrose (Assistant Director, Brent CCG) expressed that there was more awareness of the emotional needs of young people, but that there was still stigma for mental health illness. There was ongoing work to increase services in the area of emotional and mental health support but it was dependent on there being enough professionals to deliver the services. Brent CCG were looking at how they could offer support without clinical professionals before and after treatment. The Committee were presented with a PowerPoint explaining the different services available for young people to access support. Services highlighted included:
BEWS (Brent Emotional Wellbeing Service), a psychologically led service with a team of 4 psychologists. The service provided consultations to social workers and foster parents of Looked After Children and group support to foster parents. Duncan Ambrose drew the Committees’ attention to the case study in slide 4 of the presentation as an example of the work done by BEWS and the links it made with other services. BEWS could refer children to specialist CAMHS.
CAMHS Learning Disability Team, which supported children who found it difficult to put experiences into words to communicate. The service offered Positive Behaviour support plan intervention and medication amongst other offers.
Targeted / Specialist CAMHS Services, to which a young person could be referred by a Social Worker, GP or school, or through online self-referral. The service prioritised Looked After Children referrals and the timeline for Looked After Children to begin an intervention was shorter than non-Looked After Children. Currently the service only offered support up to 18 years old, but the age range was due to change to 25 over the next 4-5 years. The purpose of the service was to conduct an intervention, where the specialist and young person would work out a goal to manage symptoms and return to coping. Every week the CCG received a report on how many young inpatients the service had taken.
Brent Centre for Young People, a service which specialised in psychotherapy and had an expanding range of services. The service worked with young people up to the age of 25, therefore a young person reaching 18 could be referred to the service by
Specialist CAMHS to allow consistent care up to 25 years old.
Kooth.com, an online self-referral service. The service allowed young people to access support online but could facilitate getting additional help and link to the specialist CAMHS service. A young person was able to request a call from a counsellor for up to an hour during the week or use the text service. The young person would be interacting with trained counsellors. It was highlighted that there had been a good take up of the service, which peaked at around 8pm. The service was available Monday to Friday from 12pm to 10pm, and Saturday to Sunday and Bank Holidays from 5pm – 10pm. The service signposted to all other services. It was confirmed that chat data would not be retained in the chat but that the counsellor would keep case notes that only them and the young person could have access to.
Duncan Ambrose highlighted that services used a trauma informed approach, which was working well.
Brent now had a 24/7 crisis service with 100% response rate for crisis calls, whose number was signposted to through Kooth and NHS 111. In 2020 there was also a home treatment service available for those who needed to see someone the same day but were safe at home.
Members queried how familiar Primary Care Networks were with these services for young people. Duncan Ambrose advised that information was cascaded and there was a training programme for GPs, which was the main route for giving information. He advised that a group of young people were looking at what was available online to make recommendations on whether it was helpful or not.
Regarding the prioritisation of Looked After Children for Specialist CAMHS, members queried how that process worked. Duncan Ambrose explained that if someone was referred to the service without information to say they were looked after it was hard to prioritise on that basis. The CCG now had a list of all Looked After Children that they could use for linking up, but tended not to hold patient level data. The CCG knew the incidence of Mental Health Illness was 4 times higher in Looked After Children, so the basis on which cases were prioritised were the immediate urgency for the case and the system around the young person. Clinical judgement was used to prioritise cases and there was not a separate team dedicated to Looked After Children. Cases were categorised into urgent, emergency and routine. All crisis cases were being met on time, and 77% of routine cases were being met on time.
Care Leavers in Action advised that they were not aware of the Brent Centre for Young People, and Councillor Conneely advised that the level of knowledge depended on how closely an organisation worked with the Council and CCG. A colleague was hired a year ago to work on the engagement and visibility of the service in the community. Duncan Ambrose added that there was a dedicated engagement service known as Brent Young People Thrive that helped CCG shape strategy and plans.
RESOLVED:
That the presentation for Emotional and Mental Health of Looked After Children be noted.