Please mind the (mental health) gap

28 Jul 2023 Home / Blog / Please mind the (mental health) gap /

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Cast your mind back to January 2021, the country is in its third and most miserable lockdown, schools are closed to the majority of children again and not even the weather or novelty of a staying home is there to ease the pain. I remember worrying right at the beginning of lockdown just what this would mean for our children’s mental health and sadly it didn’t take long to find out.

In that first six months of 2021 West Sussex saw a terrible surge in the mental health needs of our children. We saw widespread despair in some of our young people and services were not equipped to deal with this sudden crisis. We knew that our local authority services would have to adapt and step up with partners to support our children. So, locally we tried something different which was outside of our traditional local authority safeguarding services and provided something more responsive and preventative than our local child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS).

We set up a triage service working daily in each of the schools. This was a multi-agency team made up of Social Workers, CAMHS, police, YMCA, nurses, and the local borough council. This service identified those children of concern, shared information and created a plan to support that child.

This proved so effective that two years on it is now an established way of working with all of our schools, providing a responsive way to meet any localised issues and to support the changing and evolving needs of our children. Any school can sign up to the scheme and prior to joining schools are provided with training to support their understanding of suicide and suicide risk.

The team now meets three times a week and has recently been joined by GPs who have supported a greater level of engagement with our Primary Care Networks in addressing the suicidality of children.

This year alone we have supported over 300 children this way, 89% of whom were presenting with risk of suicide. Over 11% of those children were neuro diverse; in fact, neuro diversity, self-harm and domestic abuse were the three most significant factors that prompted schools to refer children into triage.

We have known for a long time that services to support children’s mental health needs a national review. Our scheme has proved that preventative, non-stigmatising, responsive services are effective and that the local authority is well placed to lead across the partnership.