The Need for Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy

The costs of not providing comprehensive services for children and young people are high and a large number of those in need do not currently have access to child and adolescent psychotherapy.

At the launch of the current national review of CAMHS the Children’s Secretary Ed Balls and Health Secretary Alan Johnson said:

“The Government knows that there are still gaps in the current CAMHS system and wants to see more early intervention in schools, as well as services working better together across the different boundaries to ensure that children and young people get the best support available regardless of the complexity of their needs.”

Child and adolescent psychotherapy is often the chosen treatment for children and young people with the most complex and severe mental health problems where other interventions have been tried and not led to improvements. Children and young people with severe emotional and behavioural disturbances use a lot of resources within the NHS and wider children’s services and the early intervention of a locally based child and adolescent psychotherapy service is likely to prevent the intensification of their difficulties and hence the costs to services.

The NHS and partner agencies need to have staff with high level competencies to provide a sustainable local service and to support workers with less specialist trainings who will be in contact with highly disturbed and disturbing children and young people. The type of children and young people with complex and co-morbid difficulties who have been identified in numerous studies as being the most costly in terms of their use of resources are precisely the type of patient who can most benefit from the highly skilled intervention of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists.

Document 6 : Invest to Save: The cost-effectiveness of developing child and adolescent psychotherapy services. This document demonstrates that investment in child and adolescent psychotherapy can provide positive long-term outcomes for children, young people and their families and, significantly, this can result in cost-savings and better use of resources for the NHS, children’s services and partner agencies.

Document 7: This following document is an example of a 5 Year Strategy for the development of child and adolescent psychotherapy services from Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Trust. This may be a helpful template for developing local plans.