Question

1: 3 children in every Primary School classroom is affected by Mental Health.  We know that children with Mental Health difficulties face unequal chances in their lives and that 50% of adults with Mental Health experienced their first symptoms before the age of 14 years old and 75% before 18 years old.

How is Wokingham supporting and empowering children’s’ Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing and their families, in particular bridging the gap before a crisis situation e.g. meeting CAMHs threshold, so that it doesn’t reach that point? 

Noted that:

Health & Wellbeing Strategy Action Plan for 2017-2020 mentions children and Young people twice.

Promoting and supporting good mental health 1.8 – Scope the potential of schools nursing service to contribute to development of resilience in children and young people.

Enabling and empowering resilient communities 2.2 – Berkshire Health Trust Mental Health strategy implementation plans for child and adolescence mental health.

Berkshire Health Trust Mental Health strategy 2016 – 2020 – Improve the transition to adult mental health services for young people in CAMH service.

No mention of children.

Question

1: 3 children in every Primary School classroom is affected by Mental Health.  We know that children with Mental Health difficulties face unequal chances in their lives and that 50% of adults with Mental Health experienced their first symptoms before the age of 14 years old and 75% before 18 years old. 

How is Wokingham supporting and empowering children’s’ Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing and their families, in particular bridging the gap before a crisis situation e.g. meeting CAMHs threshold, so that it doesn’t reach that point? 

Noted that:

Health & Wellbeing Strategy Action Plan for 2017-2020 mentions children and Young people twice.

Promoting and supporting good mental health 1.8 – Scope the potential of schools nursing service to contribute to development of resilience in children and young people.

 Enabling and empowering resilient communities 2.2 – Berkshire Health Trust Mental Health strategy implementation plans for child and adolescence mental health.

Berkshire Health Trust Mental Health strategy 2016 – 2020 – Improve the transition to adult mental health services for young people in CAMH service. 

No mention of children.

Answer:

There are a number of strategic developments ongoing and that will be progressed over the next few years with regards to improving the life chances and choices for children and young people with mental health needs.

The Wokingham Borough Council School Nursing Service is currently being redesigned.  The new service will be effective at the beginning of the autumn term, fairly soon.  The Public Health Team are working in partnership with other key agencies and stakeholders to strengthen prevention pathways by linking into, and between, services such as CAMHS, sexual health services, substance misuse, domestic abuse services, Police, health, GPs, education and the youth offending service.

In addition to the School Nurse Service redesign the universal and tier 2 mental health services for children and young people are also going through a redesign.  We are proposing to align children’s emotional and mental health support and the wider early help offer with the aim of bringing better outcomes to children and young people earlier.  We are exploring the best way to do this and have been linking in with key stakeholders including schools and yourselves.

The ambitions for children and young people’s emotional and mental health of this Borough and Berkshire West is set out in the Local Transformation Plan – and there is a link on our website.  The Local Authority is also working on a localised mental health strategy that is in development and links with the Local Transformation Plan.

In addition to the redesign work there are a number of other initiatives that are taking place across the Borough to support children and young people’s emotional and mental health.  For example, we are currently piloting the School Link project which aims to build up knowledge and support in schools to identify and support emotional and mental health needs earlier before they require specialist clinical support.  This aligns with the new government ambitions that have been set out in the Children’s Mental Health Green Paper.  We can give you a link to that.  Another example of our initiatives is the Psychological Perspectives in Education and Primary Care (PPEP) training programme, this provides training and actionable strategies for professionals to employ to identify and support emotional and mental health needs.  We also have a very active voluntary sector that contributes to this Board and both the Local Authority and Clinical Commissioning Group support.  For example ARC Youth Counselling offer a free counselling service across the Borough in a number of locations, including some schools.

Lastly, we thought we would add, we are talking about preventing crisis.  If a crisis does occur we have a service in place to help and prevent further crises.  This service is called the CAMHS rapid response and urgent care service and supports children and young people within the Borough and across Berkshire West.  The service provides short term intensive interventions in the community to support young people who have experienced a mental health crisis with the aim of reducing the number of children and young people who have a second or subsequent crisis.

Supplementary Question:

Recently we have been to an event in West Berkshire and they have got a fantastic plan in place, they have a wellbeing team and wellbeing champions.  Is this something that Wokingham will also offer?  I understand that Wokingham and West Berkshire have the Wellbeing Academy but that this starts at the age of 11, and we know early intervention, that we should be supporting the children a lot earlier and I wondered what plans we have in place for that.

Supplementary Answer which was provided by the Interim Director People Services:

That is a good suggestion, the West Berkshire model.  We are duty bound as a local authority and a local area with our partners and the CCG, the NHS and the voluntary community, to look at what works, and if there is evidence based practice out there to improve our systems and processes, then absolutely we are duty bound to look at how we can bring those processes to this authority.  So if it is evidence based, has a positive impact on improving the life chances and choices for our children and young people, we are very open minded, but rest assured we are aware of the West Berkshire model.