03.08.15
Children’s mental health services to get £172m funding
NHS England has announced £30m of funding to help young people with eating disorders as the first stage in a wider investment in children’s mental health services totalling £172m.
It aims to achieve 95% of patients being seen within four weeks by 2020, with urgent cases pushed to just one week, to help them earlier on.
The initial funding seeks to improve the wellbeing of sufferers through community-based eating disorder services to decrease the need for in-patient care.
The Royal College of Psychiatrists had previously found that almost 80% of child and adolescent psychiatrists had safeguarding concerns about patients waiting for beds, partly due to limited community-based services.
Dr Martin McShane, national clinical director for long term conditions at NHS England, said: “It is clinically proven that patients recover most quickly when we treat them as early and as close to home as possible. By prioritising our focus on doing this we can minimise the number of young people who end up needing more specialised in-patient care.”
The cash injection will be recurrent for five years as part of the autumn statement of 2014, adding on to the £1.25bn promised for CAMHS in the March budget.
NHS England will also be investing an extra £133m in improving underage mental health, with a further £9m spent by Health Education England.
Of this investment, £75m will go to CCGs to improve local services after devising plans with schools and families for review and funding in the autumn.
Another £58m will fund the expansion of the CYP Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme to develop perinatal mental health care, children’s in-patient services, and greater online support. Part of this will be directed at children with learning disabilities and those in the justice system.
NHS England national clinical director for children and young people, Dr Jacqueline Cornish, said: “It is absolutely apparent, and something endorsed by young people themselves, that more of the same is simply not an option.
“Unless we make real changes across the whole system, opportunities to build resilience, promote good mental health and intervene early when problems first arise will continue to be missed, and the opportunity to build a stronger youth for future generations lost.”