Minutes:
Janette Fullwood, Head of Children, Young People and Families at East Berkshire CCG presented an update on the Children and Young People’s Local Transformation Plan.
The NHS Long Term Plan had pledged to invest £2.3billion in care for children and young people’s mental health. East Berkshire CCG had applied for over £1m of this funding, which was starting to take effect. Crisis care had been expanded to include at 24/7 hotline. The rapid response team and crisis service at Frimley Hospital had been invested in. The focus of developments was around earlier intervention, and crisis care.
Janette informed Board members of the Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision green paper, which encouraged every school and college to appoint a designated mental health lead. Mental Health support teams would be working in one fifth of the country by 2023.
Partners were reminded that although Local Transformation Plans were co-ordinated by the CCG, the concept was a system-wide plan. The Plan had been completed in October 2018 and had been signed off by all statutory bodies. Education representatives were now included in the work, and the Local Authority had strong representation. The Joint Commissioning Board oversaw the work of the Local Transformation Plan.
Janette advised that the next area of work for the Local Transformation Plan was to co-author some work with children and young people themselves. Public Health colleagues in Slough had begun a co-production network of young people and a similar project may be established in Bracknell Forest.
The Young Minds participation and I Thrive programmes had influenced language change around tiers and allocations, to improve clarity around tiers of care.
Parenting support had been improved across Local Authorities, and workforce training was being launched in September 2019.
8 staff across partner organisations were being trained as Mental Health First Aid instructors. It was hoped that a ‘train the trainer’ approach could be adopted to train instructors in their own system.
An external review of Autistic Spectrum Disorder and ADHD had been completed and signed off, and an action plan arising from this review was in production.
There remained a significant number of inappropriate referrals into specialist services, and work was ongoing to understand the reasons behind this. The LTP group would meet in July to formulate an action plan to address any reasons behind inappropriate referrals.
A subgroup of the LTP for Children Looked After had been established to address past difficulties around the care of this demographic. A Looked After Children CAMHS worker post had been established to work across the three Local Authorities to give advice.
A Frimley Hospital Liaison post had been funded until April 2020 to provide support between Local Authorities and hospitals when children and young people present at hospital with a mental health crisis.
£300k had been invested into the CAMHS Eating Disorder service, which had been commissioned to see 100 referrals per year and currently saw 134 per year. The investment would be used to deliver educational preventative work.
The challenges to the programme included:
· the recruitment to the specialist CAMHS post which reflected a national recruitment issue,
· lack of additional investment from other areas of the system
· an increase in the complexity of children and young people accessing specialist services
· a lack of joined up commissioning
· a small number of most vulnerable and expensive cases
Partners had agreed not to apply for the first phase of the Mental Health support team pilot and had just applied to be considered for the second phase. The outcome of this bid would be found out in July 2019. The scope of this work was young people aged 5-18 in educational settings, including further education and apprenticeship providers. The expression of interest had been put together with wider stakeholders, including the young health champions. The Mental Health teams would be employed by Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust and would sit within Local Authorities to serve a cluster of schools.
Arising from questions, the following points were noted:
· The Local Transformation Plan had been written including the input of 1000 children and young people. A revisited survey would be conducted when work was further progressed.
· The Local Transformation Plan had been approved by NHS England.
· Partner communication around the planned work would be useful to signify a shared ownership of the plan.
· It was stressed that if partners’ budgets were pooled further, more collaborative work could be achieved.
· The Board requested a regular update on the LTP at its meetings, and an update against evidence of impact at its first meeting in 2020. Public Health colleagues offered to prepare a comparative dataset for the Board’s use.
· Partners queried how the messages arising from the work of the LTP would be communicated to children, young people and families.
Then Board thanked Janette for her presentation.