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Lack of provision of mental health service

Posted By Scared Mum

"Lack of provision of mental health service"

About: GPs in Nottingham City Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust / Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services – Community(City)

(as a carer),

My 17 year old son developed symptoms of severe depression 10 weeks before his 18th birthday.  His GP prescribed an antidepressant and told us that they would like to refer him to CAMHS but couldn’t because he was too close to being 18 when the adult service would take over. Suggested some NHS counselling services but when contacted they replied that they were unable to offer him anything until he was 18. He deteriorated further and 2 weeks later had a serious suicide attempt, ending up in hospital. He was told he would see a DPN from CAMHS prior to Discharge. He waited 6 hours for someone to come who told us that they were actually not a proper member of the crisis team. We asked about his ongoing antidepressant medication and were told that it would be discussed at the crisis team MDT the following day and his GP would be contacted. He was made a follow up appointment with the crisis team 10 days later.

The outcome of the MDT was not communicated promptly to his GP who had to chase it up and in fact was advised not to give any further medication - however, fortunately our GP started another drug anyway. The follow up appointment was with a ‘practioner’ and health care assistant who offered no suggestions for treatment and was a total waste of time. They again told us to contact the counselling services who had already turned him down. Our GP received no communication from them and tried to speak to a consultant, but this was unhelpful. 

He has remained very ill and has had absolutely no treatment offered by CAMHS for 8 weeks. My husband and I both work within the NHS and in both of our services there is proper provision for 17 year olds to transition across to adult services. The CAMHS service needs to improve this quickly before more young people in their moment of need are failed. We have the resources to take matters into our own hands and have arranged a private psychiatric review and private counselling for our son - many others would not have the resources to do this.

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Responses

Response from Amanda Forster, Operational lead, CAMHS Crisis and Liaison team, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust 3 years ago
Amanda Forster
Operational lead, CAMHS Crisis and Liaison team,
Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

Submitted on 12/11/2020 at 14:10
Published on Care Opinion at 14:10

Dear Scared Mum

Firstly, I am so sorry to hear your son is still remaining unwell and wish him and yourselves all the best for recovery.

As team, we take feedback very seriously and are sorry that on this occasion, we did not meet your standards for input. I would be grateful if you would call me, if you have time on 0115 8440560 to speak to me or Helena Marren (Clinical Lead) about specific information and how we can improve.

I would like to offer some clarity to some of the important points you have made.

As a liaison service, we must respond to any referral within 1 hour and see the young person within 4 hours. I wonder, due to the workload that our colleagues are experiencing in the emergency departments, whether a referral was made to us in a timely manner on the day that you and your son attended? Again, I would like to speak to you, if able to discuss this further as 6 hours would be considerably longer that we would want and this must have been very distressing.

When you comment that the clinician was ‘not a proper member of the crisis team’ I can confirm that on rare occasions, often to cover sickness, we use bank staff but these staff are highly skilled and experienced and will always be a qualified mental health nurse (Band 6- senior level) social worker/psychotherapist. I can confirm that we have used bank staff very rarely recently.

You speak about seeing a ‘practitioner’, again, perhaps this was not made clear enough and this is where we can improve. All ‘crisis practitioners’ are qualified nurses/social workers or allied health professionals who are significantly experienced and trained. I will ensure that the team are informed to introduce themselves and their roles properly.

As a joint Crisis and Liaison Team, we do not have the ability to offer long-term work due to the nature of our commissioning and purpose of the team. We are very aware that young people aged 17.5 on referral into CAMHS do face barriers.

CAMHS and Adult Mental Health have employed ‘transitions workers’ recently and there are forums set up to ensure young people referred at this time, are not disadvantaged due to waiting times. As a Crisis and Liaison Team we have invested in volunteers and service users to help us develop services.

I am very glad that our consultant psychiatrist was able to liaise with your GP but saddened that, on this occasion, it wasn’t felt to be helpful.

Again, I reiterate that we remain open to hearing your story and looking at how we can improve.

Best wishes

Amanda Forster.

Operational Lead, CAMHS Crisis and Liaison team

Hopewood Tel: 0115 8440560

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