Mental health services for children & young people: the past, present and future of service development and policy
Framework Feature in Mental Health Review - Volume 9, Issue 2 June 2004
By Stella Charman, Director, CAMHS Consultants
Introduction
This article provides an overview of the development of mental health services for children and young people (CAMHS) in England and Wales. It describes the early growth and gradual emergence of services to the forefront of national policy in recent years. The present position in relation to the national policy agenda and CAMHS development is assessed, and some conclusions are drawn about how services are likely to change in the future in response to a variety of influences. Comments and observations regarding the impact of policy on services are based on the author’s extensive experience of working as a consultant with CAMHS and on a database of information on over 40 specialist teams.
THE PAST
Child Guidance
Although the development of child psychoanalysis and the child guidance model date back to the 1920s, it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the mental health of children became the subject of study and research by the mainstream mental health professions. Mental health services for children then began a long struggle to attract the same degree of attention and resources as did adults, but they were largely overlooked by policy-makers and managers alike until the last decade. In a National Health Service in which mental health was generally regarded as a ‘Cinderella’ service, child and adolescent mental health services were an immature offshoot. Most commonly, services began to develop and were configured within child guidance clinics, which in theory combined professional skills from different agencies but frequently failed to produce an appropriate multidisciplinary therapeutic response to the problems presented by children and their families. Many of these clinics were uncomfortable places in which to work, and appeared to be disconnected from and unaccountable to the health authorities and the education and social services departments which had placed staff within them. By the 1990s many were either being dismantled and the staff and resources withdrawn to parent agencies, or were being re-born as child and family consultation clinics which have since grown into the specialist CAMHS teams of today.
Focus on children’s rights
The turning point for CAMHS came with an emerging awareness of the needs and rights of children, independently of those of adults, which was given international recognition and status by the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. In the UK the Children Act 1989 was passed. This new focus led to a number of major reports and studies being undertaken in the early 1990s which identified serious deficits in service provision, proposed significant service changes, and laid the foundation for the development of more effective provision for children and young people.
Emergence of the 4-tier model of CAMHS
In 1994 the first comprehensive audit of the resources available to children and young people with mental health problems uncovered wide variations in staffing and practices across England, and highlighted the mis-match between resources and need (Kurtz et al, 1994). Its findings were incorporated into Together We Stand, a Health Advisory Service (1995) review of specialist child & adolescent mental health services which gave a detailed account of the characteristics of nation-wide CAMHS at the time with sections on epidemiology, needs assessment, service principles, commissioning and providing. In the same year the Health of the Nation Handbook on Child & Adolescent Mental Health appeared which covered similar ground to the HAS review but in a more targeted format (Department of Health et al, 1995).
The main achievements of these two documents have been to establish the now widely accepted 4-tiered service model (see diagram) as the national service model, and to increase the level of awareness and understanding of the issues facing CAMHS among a wide range of stakeholders. They are still widely used as reference documents by those reviewing and developing services.

Needs assessment
Parallel to the emergence of the national service model, there was a growing commitment to needs assessment as a tool for guiding service development. The NHS Executive commissioned a review which brought together the best information available on the incidence and prevalence of mental ill health in children and on service effectiveness so that each separate health authority did not have to repeat the same research (Wallace et al, 1997). A later study confirmed the risk factors for children’s mental health problems and provided a social profile for children in contact with services as a result of mental, emotional and behavioural difficulties (Melzer et al, 2000).
Requirement for inter-agency working
In 1997 CAMHS were scrutinised by the House of Commons Health Committee, which highlighted the under-resourcing and poor staffing of services, the importance of primary care, the lack of robust information and the need for better joint working. But social services were increasingly aware of the importance of addressing children’s emotional needs; there was growing concern about the high levels of mental health morbidity among children in care, and frustration that many CAMHS teams were unwilling or unable to meet their needs (Department of Health, 1995b; Utting, 1998). The 1996/7 Priorities and Planning Guidance for the first time made mental health services for children one of six areas for special monitoring, and they were given further specific attention in the National Priorities Guidance for 1999/00-2001/02 (Department of Health, 1995a; Department of Health, 1998a). This guidance was directed jointly at local and health authorities, and required social services to lead on children’s welfare and inter-agency working, and to share the lead with health authorities on mental health and reducing inequalities. However, at this stage the guidance remained largely aspirational, inter-agency tension continued, and it would be a further four years before local agencies and services were required to make it a reality.
CAMHS within an integrated network of services
Within the NHS, children’s services and more specifically CAMHS, were struggling throughout the later years of the twentieth century with poorly developed services to fulfil their function and to achieve recognition as a priority for attention and investment. In contrast, the care and support of children and young people had long been a major priority for the education and social services departments. This was reinforced by the Quality Protects initiative which required social services departments to extend their responsibilities and improve the quality of their services to the children they looked after (Department of Health, 1998c), and by the Supporting Families consultation paper which made proposals to improve parenting support (Home Office, 1998). In addition, education departments were required to develop behaviour policies for schools and to reduce the number of exclusions.
Underlying the implementation of such initiatives was the requirement for better partnership working across agencies with the result that CAMHS were increasingly seen as one component of a wider, integrated system supporting children. For example, the connection between school exclusion, juvenile crime, substance misuse and mental ill health became well recognised and the expectation was that services would work together to tackle the social consequences. This led to the creation of new multi-agency services such as youth offending teams. The policy emphasis on joined-up solutions for joined-up problems created a big impact on CAMHS which began to experience increased demands and referral pressures. Many teams reacted defensively in order to restrict their limited resources to the treatment of mental illness, rather than solving wider social problems for which they felt ill-suited and under-funded. Many also felt that there was little evidence that such multi-agency approaches would produce improved outcomes for children and young people.
Legislation for partnership
By 1998, the government was concerned that despite all the talk and published guidance about partnership working, little had been achieved at the operational level to integrate services. Legislative barriers were cited as one explanation for this, although it is clear that cultural differences and varying priorities between agencies were the real reasons underlying the failure of joint working. Further guidance, Partnership in Action, was published (Department of Health, 1998b), and then the Health Act 1999 came into force which provided a statutory framework for the pooling of budgets at both commissioning and operational levels, and opportunities for fully integrated service provision. Only one CAMHS project was among the first 26 schemes using the flexibilities offered by the Act, which initially appealed more to learning disability and older people’s services. The Department of Health began actively encouraging more CAMHS partnership schemes to be developed, but encountered much apprehension and found CAMHS reluctant to enter this newly-created ‘flexible’ environment.
New funding
In 1999 the government announced that it was to make £84 million in new funds available to CAMHS via the NHS modernisation fund and the new mental health grant. Release of these funds was dependent upon the development of joint strategies and implementation plans for the provision of effective services, based on local needs assessment. Unfortunately, the third year of this funding was not ring-fenced or protected against the encroachment of financial pressures elsewhere within the NHS, and in many areas it was not possible to fulfill the plans agreed with partners, further straining relationships.
Targeting & priorities for health improvement
The 1999 White Paper Saving Lives: Our Healthier Nation and the Reducing Inequalities Action Report, which accompanied it, made mental health a national priority and highlighted the importance of targeting services on socially disadvantaged groups. These two documents made it clear that early interventions in the lives of children would improve their health and well-being in later years. Many health authorities had identified vulnerable children and families as a local priority for their health improvement programmes, and were focussing attention on CAMHS, especially in socially and economically deprived areas where morbidity and demand were high. Also, 1999 saw the publication of the consultation document Bridging the Gap which examined the needs of 13-19 year olds and led to the Connexions initiative of establishing personal advisers to support and guide young people (Department for Education and Skills, 1999).
Need for a national approach
Concern was again raised about the quality of CAMHS across the country by the report Bright Futures which made a wide range of recommendations covering all aspects of services and requiring extensive cross-Government commitment (Mental Health Foundation, 1999). These recommendations included:
- further financial investment in services
- the introduction of a National Service Framework for children’s mental health to set national practice standards and service models
- a national advisory committee to provide a strategic focus for children’s mental health
- a statutory duty of co-operation between health and local authority departments
- the development of joint children’s services plans
- the promotion of mental health awareness and active inclusion policies in schools.
Service failures and inequity found by Audit Commission
Publication of the Mental Health Foundation’s report was closely followed in September 1999 by the Audit Commission’s national report: Children in Mind. This revealed the results of an extensive survey of provision across England and Wales and showed wide variations in both levels of resources and practice which bore little relation to need. It also highlighted the lack of integration of CAMHS with services for children provided by other agencies. Its recommendations included the following:
- separate budgets for CAMHS which are explicitly related to measured need and demand
- review of staffing arrangements
- strengthening of links with and support to tier1 (primary care)
- improved access to services and standards for waiting times
- health authorities should be the lead agency for CAMHS commissioning and engage partners in priority setting and service development
- greater consultation with users and carers
- improvements in information systems.
The NHS Plan
In the summer of 2000 the government published the NHS Plan (Department of Health, 2000a) within which CAMHS were not separately identified but were implicated in a number of the plan’s commitments alongside other services. The broad agenda for modernisation and targets for patients’ choice and access were equally applicable to CAMHS as to any other part of the NHS. Of particular relevance were the promised 50 new early intervention teams to provide treatment in the community to young people with psychosis and their families, the expansion of Sure Start projects, and improvements in prison mental health services including those for young offenders. But perhaps the most immediate impact of the NHS Plan on CAMHS was the requirement in the NHS Plan Implementation Programme (Department of Health, 2000b) for CAMHS development strategies to be produced and signed by all partners by May 2001.
New national policy focus on Children
At the same time a new national focus for children began to emerge with the establishment by the government of the Children & Young People’s Unit, the appointment of a national clinical director for children and the allocation of new resources via the Children’s Fund. This was followed by the announcement that a National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services would be drawn up which would include a section dealing with CAMHS. The NSF would set national standards and prescribe the service requirements for a comprehensive service that matched the 4-Tier model. A service mapping exercise was begun in order to collect national information about the composition and workload of services and teams, and to establish a baseline against with growth in services could be measured. Suddenly, CAMHS teams found themselves caught up at the centre of a policy revolution, supported by a rigorous performance management framework which would not allow any team or service to hide away unnoticed.
Shifting the Balance of Power & organisational restructuring
In April 2001 the government outlined its intention to devolve responsibility from the centre to locally accountable ‘frontline’ organisations (Department of Health, 2001). This heralded the demise of health authorities which had hitherto had responsibility for the overall planning and commissioning of CAMHS and contained the public health expertise required to undertake needs assessment. At this time a large number of community-based NHS trusts disappeared, and their services divided between primary care trusts (PCTs) and larger specialist mental health NHS trusts. The establishment of PCTs over the course of 2001 and 2002 systematically dismantled the specialist commissioning and public health skills which had begun to steer service development, and left CAMHS within a provider-led system and with strategic development plans forgotten. A few confident CAMHS teams which had lost their community trust ‘homes’ in this reorganisation took the opportunity to join the newly-forming PCTs and to influence their development from the start. Most, however, retreated to the apparent safety of specialist mental health organisations or remained within acute NHS trusts which were largely unaffected by restructuring.
THE PRESENT
Priorities and Planning Framework 2003-2006
The accelerating pace of policy development described in the first section of this article put CAMHS into the spotlight as never before and the world in which services now find themselves is bewildering and turbulent. Teams which had existed and survived with little development, but with equally little management attention to their performance and practice, found themselves exposed to change and experiencing the trauma of transition. The first significant indication of change was the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s insistence on a specific reference to CAMHS in the Department of Health’s public service agreement (PSA) with the Treasury in 2002. This included the objective of improving ‘life outcomes of adults and children with mental health problems through year on year improvements in access to crisis and CAMH services...’ and was subsequently reinforced in the Priorities and Planning Framework 2003-2006 (Department of Health 2002). It is made clear that the NSF and its Emerging Findings document would set out the required standards and milestones for improvement in CAMHS, including year on year improvements in access. All CAMHS are expected to provide comprehensive services including mental health promotion and early intervention by 2006. Underpinning these objectives is the ‘national capacity assumption’ that services will grow by at least 10% each year according to agreed local priorities, demonstrated by increased staffing, patient contact and/or investment.
CAMHS funding
To support investment in CAMHS and ensure the growth of services according to national targets, the government has allocated an additional £250 million, a figure reported by the National CAMHS Support Service (see below) to represent an increase of 60% by 2006 on current CAMHS spending. These funds are entering the system progressively via local authorities in the form of a CAMHS grant from 2002/3, and PCTs from 2004/5 in the form of separately identified, but not formally ring-fenced, centrally-funded service improvement monies. The total sum may not be as large as has been allocated to some other areas of the children’s agenda, but nevertheless represents a powerful demonstration of the commitment to change at a national level. It also generates a corresponding obligation on the part of services to respond to the challenge and embrace the new vision for CAMHS.
National CAMHS Support Service
A further indication of the government’s commitment to change in CAMHS is the establishment in 2003 of the national CAMHS support service within the Department of Health. (Unlike other elements of the national children’s programme, CAMHS was not transferred to the Department for Education and Skills.) The service consists of a national CAMHS implementation lead officer and 11 regional development workers (RDWs) who combine national roles for the development of CAMHS performance indicators, communication, training and commissioning with providing assistance to local CAMHS staff, teams, managers and partnerships. This team is beginning to prove very effective in raising the profile of CAMHS, influencing policy development and ensuring that PCTs, local authorities and trusts are not able to ignore their joint responsibilities.
CAMHS Grant Guidance and Emerging Findings
More detail about what services are required to deliver is contained in the CAMHS Grant Guidance 2003/04 (Department of Health, 2000c) and Section 7 of the Emerging Findings of the National Service Framework for Children, Young People and Maternity Services (Department of Health, 2003a). A ‘comprehensive CAMHS’ is seen as extending well beyond specialist services to include universal or generic children’s services (tier 1) which do not have mental health as their core business, but nonetheless make an important contribution and perform the function of identifying and referring children with problems. Support and training for these services, and enhancing capacity at tier 1, is now regarded as an essential element of service development and the recruitment of primary mental health workers to fulfil this task is now proceeding in most areas. However, the level of grant available, lack of availability of suitable candidates with mental health qualifications, and ongoing tensions between agencies mean that some areas will have difficulty in recruiting the minimum of four per ‘local CAMHS’ that is expected by the guidance. Emerging Findings specifies the key elements of service development which will form the basis of the CAMHS module in the NSF (at the time of writing, expected in the summer of 2004) and formed the foundation for an Assessment Matrix for a Comprehensive CAMHS (Department of Health, 2003b) against which all services will be performance monitored in future. The following are the main headings:
- commissioning
- partnership
- developmentally appropriate care
- evidence-based practice, training and a skilled and competent workforce
- service composition
- access
- users’ views
- audit & outcomes.
Commissioning
It is now widely recognised, if not explicitly stated, that effective CAMHS commissioning has been a casualty of recent structural change in the NHS. Its importance is now being re-emphasised within the Emerging Findings document and through performance management mechanisms. CAMHS development strategies are currently being reviewed by strategic health authorities (SHAs), which have responsibility for performance management and the national CAMHS support service. Needs assessments are regarded as an essential component of commissioning CAMHS and in 2005 audited needs assessments will become a performance indicator contributing to the star ratings of PCTs, alongside demonstrable increases in investment.
Partnership
The message of partnership working is likewise being reinforced and partnerships for commissioning and provision of CAMHS are expected to utilise the flexibilities permitted by the Health Act 1999. Emerging Findings highlights the areas in which co-ordinated and integrated services based on multi-agency partnerships are regarded especially important:
- child protection and post-abuse therapy
- children with behavioural difficulties
- children with special educational needs/learning disabilities
- youth justice services
- transition between CAMHS & AMHS
- substance misuse
- early intervention in psychosis
- deliberate self-harm
However, following the Green Paper Every Child Matters (Department for Education and Skills, 2003) discussion about partnership structures has in many areas been subsumed in the wider consideration of children’s trusts. CAMHS are generally regarded as a key component of children’s trusts in the form envisaged by the Green Paper, although of the pilot Pathfinder trusts approved by the Department of Health in 2003 only one out of 35 focuses exclusively on CAMHS.
Developmentally appropriate care
There is a wide variability in the age range covered by different CAMHS teams (Audit Commission, 1999). Emerging Findings expects all services to cover the full 0-18 years with services that meet the needs of infants as well as those of young people in transition to adult services. This requirement is already creating considerable anxiety within teams that feel under-resourced to meet the needs of the 0-16 age group they currently serve, especially without additional funds allocated to its achievement.
A competent workforce
The Emerging Findings expectation that a skilled and competent workforce is recruited to deliver a full range of interventions based on the best available evidence of good practice is particularly challenging in the face of the national shortage of professionals who are trained in children’s mental health. Vacancy rates are as high as 25% in some services. Furthermore, the role of the primary child mental health worker is only just being established in many areas and requires candidates with a new blend of skills. Successful recruitment and retention will require creative thinking on the part of local services plus the support of higher education providers and the Department of Health. Workforce and training issues are being considered by a sub-group of the national CAMHS support service.
Service composition
Emerging Findings states that ‘a critical mass of staffing is required for services to be safe, timely and effective and able to respond to a wide range of needs’. However, it is not specific about what this critical mass might be, although it envisages it varying according to local demographic factors, in particular deprivation, and that ‘additional staffing may be required’. Integration across tiers and agency boundaries is promoted in order to avoid professional and team isolation, and the importance of dedicated management and adequate facilities is stressed. However, Children in Mind (Audit Commission, 1999) demonstrated that many services have a very low level of resources, poor support from management and inadequate infrastructure. Very considerable commitment, multi-agency collaboration and investment will be required to remedy these deficiencies, particularly in areas where CAMHS have been overlooked for many years. A nation-wide CAMHS ‘mapping’ exercise has recently been completed for the second year running by the University of Durham and is widely expected to provide benchmarking data against which future growth in CAMHS can be measured. In addition, PCTs are currently revising their local delivery plans so that they more accurately reflect current investment and planned future growth, and are expected to comply with the 10% growth target.
Access, users views, and outcomes
In the past, specialist CAMHS have been traditionally provided within clinic or hospital settings, non-attendance rates tend to be high and local communities perceive services as stigmatising or intimidating. There is an expectation in Emerging Findings that a greater range of facilities will be used to encourage access, especially by children who may have been excluded altogether in the past such as those with learning disabilities. Partnership and consultation with users is seen as an important component of service development, as is routine audit and evaluation of service outcomes. These requirements represent further substantial challenges for many CAMHS. In practice, many have limited options in relation to premises, little experience of working ‘in partnership’ with users, and information systems which fail to provide accurate data about activity.
THE FUTURE
In the light of the history of CAMHS development and the demanding nature of current Government policy, how are services likely to respond in the future? This final section considers the opportunities and possibilities for CAMHS in the new environment.
Growth in provision
One of the central features of current CAMHS policy is the expectation of service growth and the establishment of a national structure for measuring and monitoring development over time. However, it remains to be seen whether the national CAMHS mapping exercise and local delivery plans provide sufficiently accurate baseline data against which to measure progress, and whether PCTs are able to protect centrally funded monies against financial pressures elsewhere in the system. More significantly, the current proposals do not define what is meant by ‘critical mass’, nor do they contain mechanisms for redressing inequities in resource distribution. Growth of 10% in a service that is already adequately or even well resourced may represent a considerable sum, whereas 10% of an under resourced service may fall well short of what is required for it to reach ‘critical mass’. It may be argued that 10% represents the minimum expected investment and partner agencies may go beyond the required level to redress inequity, but this seems highly improbable considering the pressures on budgets. The government’s approach to stimulating investment by requiring growth on a percentage basis will simply lead to widening inequity. The disparity between resources and needs identified by both the Health Advisory Service (1995) and the Audit Commission (1999) will remain. Already this issue is leading to tensions in some counties with CAMHS development strategies emphasising consistency and equity of access to services but where several PCTs have widely varying levels of investment and commitment to CAMHS.
Provider configuration and commissioning partnerships
Organisational restructuring has had a profound impact on CAMHS in the past, although it has not led to consistency in provider configuration. In the adult mental health world, specialist mental health ‘partnership’ NHS trusts with integrated locality structures are fast becoming established as the accepted organisational arrangement for provision. Out of the current debate about children’s trusts may emerge a preferred organisational solution for the commissioning and/or provision of CAMHS. However, at the time of writing it would appear that the Green Paper consultation process is not likely to impose an organisational prescription until the Pathfinder children’s trusts have been fully evaluated. Furthermore, some resistance from NHS staff is to be expected if services are to be configured within local authorities. It therefore seems likely that for the foreseeable future specialist CAMHS will continue to be provided within a variety of structures and that these will become ever more diverse as local partnerships create different and often unique solutions to suit their local organisational geography and relationships. However, commissioning partnerships are expected to make use of the Health Act 1999 flexibilities and it is likely that there will be a growth in formally created joint commissioning posts and Section 31 agreements which provide existing loosely established multi-agency groups with power and authority to lead change. However, this will only happen where multi-agency relationships are sufficiently mature, and it is certain that in some areas historical rivalries and inter-organisational tensions will persist and block effective partnership development. This is especially likely where local authorities are controlled by a political party that does not feel bound to implement government policy unchallenged.
Tiered framework and integration
Despite recent criticism of the 4-tier structure, it is still widely used and forms the basis of the government’s view of a comprehensive CAMHS (Department of Health, 2003a). Stronger commissioning partnerships should eventually lead to improved access, growth in local facilities and better value for money. However, in some areas restructuring and re-commissioning of the fourth tier has led to the new investment being spent at this level rather than on tiers 1 and 2 as anticipated. The high cost of these services presents a challenge to commissioners; it is likely that some will rise to it but others will struggle to achieve fundamental changes.
The integration agenda is also a challenge for specialist CAMHS teams which must decide whether they wish to embrace the new world or continue to maintain a narrower focus within an NHS setting. If the latter, then it is likely that they will be by-passed by new investment and that commissioners will meet policy expectations by developing new models of provision hosted by different providers. Already, tier 2 services are being developed in some areas independently of tier 3 teams (but seeking to ensure a coherent system by interaction and networking). In some areas the potential of tier 1 staff is being unlocked so that their skills and knowledge of families and their problems is brought to bear more effectively on the mental health agenda and in support of specialist services. Again, the extent to which this is achieved depends upon the vision and commitment of local partners in CAMHS, and not every solution is transferable outside the area in which it has developed.
In conclusion, the future for CAMHS has never been more full of opportunity, or more challenging, or more controversial. They now have a clear and well-established place in government policy and are a central component of the wider agenda for children’s services. If services respond to these policy challenges and are able to access investment then they will grow to maturity in a new environment that will promote a variety of creative forms of provision. But at the local level there are frequently fundamental obstacles to change which must be tackled if development is to be real rather than merely presentational, and if staff and resources are to be deployed and distributed to meet needs in an effective and equitable fashion.
References
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