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Felt abandoned by CAMHS

Posted By Sithean

"Felt abandoned by CAMHS"

About: NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde

(as a carer),

After a long struggle to access help from CAMHS services for our daughter (helped to a great extent by a previous posting in Care Opinion) we received support on and off for a 4 -year period. This included child psychotherapy and some family intervention. We initially felt well supported by an excellent family therapist/case manager who sadly left the team. Since then our experience of this team has been poor and we now feel to a large extent abandoned. 

After completion of psychotherapy with mixed results it was decided the best course of action was to complete a new series of assessments. This process started in Aug 2018 and involved a series of meetings for our daughter and ourselves with various clinicians over a long period of time. We also gathered input from our daughter’s school and observations were carried out. Completing these assessments was a significant undertaking, and at times pretty disorientating for our daughter. The process started 21 months ago, and while we were given the results of two assessments we await the outcome of two important assessments which were completed in December 2019. We find this completely unacceptable.
We have since phoned the centre repeatedly to ask for information about the outcome of the two remaining assessments and what support might be available to us. We have spoken with a variety of receptionists who have listened patiently to our concerns and promised to pass them on to relevant clinicians who, they assured us, will get back to us. Sadly, despite these repeated efforts we have been ignored and have been left with no alternative than to try other approaches including sharing these experiences here and making a formal complaint (to which we have had no response).
It is vital we know the outcome of these assessments as our daughter is at a crucial stage of her life journey. We understand this team are under huge pressure and that they are badly understaffed but it doesn’t seem too much to ask that someone have the courtesy to return our calls and to let us know what is happening – even if just to give some idea of timescales. We hope this posting helps raise awareness of the situation in some Scottish CAMHS services and might in small way lead to improved experiences for our young people and their families.
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Responses

Response from Rachel Pyle, Patient Experience Project Manager, Patient Experience Team, NHSGGC 3 years ago
Rachel Pyle
Patient Experience Project Manager, Patient Experience Team,
NHSGGC

Submitted on 06/07/2020 at 17:26
Published on Care Opinion at 17:26

picture of Rachel Pyle

Hello Sithean,

I am very sorry to read of your experience with our CAMH service. It does not meet with the standard of care we would expect for our patients.

Your post raises a number of concerns and we would really welcome the opportunity to discuss these with you, I note you have raised a complaint and are awaiting a response to this.

Could you please contact Dougie Fraser, the Service Manager at: Dougie.fraser@ggc.scot.nhs.uk so we can provide you with an update on your complaint?

Please accept my sincere apologies again for your daughters’s experience.

Thank you,

Karen Lamb

Head of Specialist Children’s Services

  • {{helpful}} {{helpful == 1 ? "person thinks" : "people think"}} this response is helpful

Update posted by Sithean (a carer)

Thank you for your response. Since writing my original posting I have been contacted by someone investigating our complaint so I feel assured it is being processed. I will though contact the service manager as suggested.

Update posted by Sithean (a carer)

The complaint described above was upheld in full. Quite quickly after this we were contacted by a CPN from the team who wanted to complete the assessment. The call came on a Friday night and the meeting took place the following day, which felt like a remarkable sense of urgency after our protracted struggles to speak with anyone! We were asked for additional information from ourselves and others to complete an assessment. We were able to confirm that some of this information had been provided to the team but it was seemingly lost, so we provided it again. This was followed by a long period of stasis which ultimately led to us following up with the person who investigated the upheld complaint (see above). This led to further contact with a different practitioner in the team but still no outcome to one last assessment. This despite repeated requests for some form of completion. This was now almost three years after those assessments were started.

It seems that this is what things have come to with CAMHS. If we are able to access help (which, is as has been well publicised, is extremely difficult to do) then we seem to enter what feels like a war of attrition. If we are prepared to pester and complain then we just might just get input. If not, then it feels like the team are just trying to wait us out, presumably until we will give up and and go away. Well, that is that stage we have got to as a family. You win. We won't be bothering you again.

I need to reiterate that we have sympathy for the practitioners in CAMHS who were massively pressured even before the pandemic. However, that doesn’t excuse the dreadful level of contact we have had. Being continually ignored is very hard for parents, adding yet more burden to households where a young person is experiencing distress. Policy makers and planners need to understand that our systems of supporting child mental health are (in our experience) now completely dysfunctional and not fit for purpose.Currently 0.5% of the NHS Scotland budget is spent on child and adolescent mental health. Massive investment is required now to change this for the future health of our children and our nation.

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