What happens next to children and young people

If there is a bulge now into children’s mental health services, we can reliably predict that there will be a rolling bulge into adults’ mental health services over the next few years. We need to consider this swell as we resource and plan our adult mental health services.  

When SCIE has supported Local Authorities and mental health trusts with reviewing their mental health pathways, knowing your data, understanding your populations and being able to predict with accuracy are critical for enabling service flow. And fluent services are central to the smooth experience of people through a system.  

If our services are going to be effective, then the experience of engaging, accessing, and exiting services needs to be smooth. A challenging service experience is additional stress, burden, and pressure on the person accessing support.  

In addition, we are all seeking to move towards an early help and preventative model across health and social care. So, we need to be thinking about this high rate of young people accessing mental health and consider how we can achieve support for them through a “reduce, prevent, delay” lens.  

Again, when SCIE works with systems, ensuring that there are well-commissioned services to enable earlier help, peer support, and community assets is essential to meeting need. None of us wants the system to get better at saying no to people who have genuine needs. We want to get better at finding help that is easy, swift, and palatable. We want to meet needs and outcomes by having straightforward options that do contribute to mental health recovery and prevention.  

Married to this need for good commissioning is the need for strong practice. This means adopting a personalised and strengths-based approach to mental health support. And central to these approaches is a confident management of risk. When SCIE supports practice in the sector, we always focus on building a shared and confident management of risk. Where practice is strengths-based and risk confident, we are empowering the individual to develop and enhance their own resources. The link to a recovery approach is evident. In our experience, the young people who are accessing mental health services don’t want to be trapped in services indefinitely, they want flexibility and independence. This means services that can be there when crisis situations emerge, but also that encourage choice and control for the individual.  

SCIE is in the midst of working with partners from across children’s and adults’ social care, young people, families, carers, and other stakeholders to think about a national set of practice principles and guidance for the transition from children’s to adults’ services. Mental health needs to be central to this conversation.  

So, if you would like to join SCIE in this important, national conversation then please sign up to our workshops, complete and share our survey and get in touch by emailing transitions@scie.org.uk. We want to hear as much as we can from all of you.