"My Health Visitor hasn't told me the truth"

I have a four year old with severe behavioural difficulties. I have mentioned this to my local health visitor on a number of occasions and during a discussion with her in November she agreed to refer my child to the local CAMHS service, which has a specialist team who work with the under-5s.

As I hadn't heard from either my health visitor or the CAMHS service about this, I contacted my GP early in the New Year. My GP confirmed there was nothing on my child's health record to indicate such a referral. I then contacted my health visitor who told me that she had made the referral as agreed.

I rang CAMHS in March to pursue this and was advised by them that my Health Visitor had not made the referral until early January, almost two months after she promised she would do so. My child cannot be seen until early May, at the earliest, and I understand and was prepared for some delay in accessing the CAMHS specialist, but I cannot understand why my Health Visitor didn't make the referral when she agreed to do so.

The family has been caused additional stress by the failure of this Health Visitor to discharge her professional duties. When I mention this to her, she just dismisses this as "a misunderstanding".

Quite simply, we feel like we cannot trust NHS staff, the people we pay for from our taxes, it is just not good enough.