Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: NHS Clinical Commissioners' response to the green paper
Mental health prevention and early intervention needs to be at the heart of the proposals being introduced by the green paper.
We have responded to the Department of Health and Department for Education’s ‘Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision: a Green Paper‘ consultation. The paper suggests a new approach to providing high-quality mental health and wellbeing support for children and young people, linked to their school or college.
In our response we draw the following conclusions:
- Mental health prevention and early intervention needs to be at the heart of the proposals being introduced by the Green Paper.
- Proposals should specify how the Green Paper’s approach fits in with other initiatives around children and young people’s mental health services.
- Proposals in the Green Paper should encourage multi agency working across commissioners and providers, and across health, social care and education. They should look at how to bring together funding from different agencies for this work.
- Additional, high-quality staff are essential for taking these proposals forward and addressing the complex range of issues and difficulties that children and young people face.
- Commissioners in some areas are already commissioning school-based mental health services as part of new model of care pilots, and other schools already have access to a counsellor or other mental health professional. However, commissioners also told us that children in schools do not always fit with the CCG/LA boundary, which is a major issue.
Our response was informed from across our membership, but particularly draws upon insights from our Mental Health Commissioners Network, with specific reference to its report ‘Of Primary Importance‘.
