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Stick with us: tackling missed appointments in children's mental health services
- Author:
- ABDINASIR Kadra
- Publisher:
- Children's Society
- Publication year:
- 2017
- Pagination:
- 68
- Place of publication:
- London
This report explores missed appointments within Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), policies to help address missed appointments and how services need to change to support children and young people. It draws on evidence from a responses to Freedom of Information (FOI) request from 39 providers of specialist CAMHS and a desk-based literature review. The analysis found that approximately 157,000 specialist appointments in specialists Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) were missed by children and young people in 2016. Missed appointments not only result in a financial cost to the NHS but pose a risk to young people themselves. Reasons for missed appointments included because of the mental health problem itself, long waiting times to get treatment, difficulty with getting to appointments, trust in adults, and the stigma around mental health. The report also found that many missed appointments are not followed up by CAMHS. The report makes recommendations to help reduce missed appointments, including: mandatory follow up by mental health services after missed appointments, shorter waiting times so children don't give up and drop out of the system, and involvement of children and young people's views in the way services are designed and delivered. (Edited publisher abstract)