CAMHS supports timely access to services, following professional clinical assessment and prioritisation, to address mental health needs of children. It is important to note that, despite increasing demands overall on CAMHS, irrespective of the source of referrals, individual cases assessed as urgent receive priority.
The importance of ensuring adolescents have access to the mental health supports they need is emphasised in HSE's National Service Plan 2017. This prioritises:
- the embedding of the existing 10 Jigsaw sites to full capacity and development of new sites in Cork, Dublin and Limerick;
- the establishment of cross divisional governance arrangements for the development and delivery of primary care based counselling services for those aged under 18 years;
- ensuring appropriate access by older adolescents to specialist mental health services and, for those requiring acute admission, their continued appropriate placement and care in child and adolescent-specific settings;
- recruiting and establishing CAMHS community based forensic mental health teams;
- continuing the development of adult and child mental health intellectual disability teams;
- further enhancing the community mental health team capacity for CAMHS teams at a consistent level across all areas within available resources. There are now 67 CAMHS teams, and 3 Paediatric Liaison Teams, supported by 66 operational CAMHS beds across the country.
With specific regard to waiting lists to CAMHS, a new Standard Operating Procedure was introduced in 2015 for both in-patient and community CAMHS services. This has contributed to improving services overall, including reducing inappropriate admissions of adolescents to adult units. The CAMHS Waiting List initiative for those waiting over 12 months commenced in April 2015, and is designed to reduce CAMHS Waiting Lists, particularly for those waiting over 12 months. Those waiting 12 months or more at end December 2016 was 218, a reduction of 187 individuals from December 2014, which stood at 405.
Examples of other existing supports in this area include universal measures for the promotion of mental well-being such as the #littlethings campaign, and a framework for mental health promotion in both primary and post-primary schools has been jointly developed by the Department of Education and Skills, the HSE and the Department of Health.
