IMPORTANT INFORMATION

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Local transformation plan for children and young people's mental health

Barnsley's Local Transformation Plan for Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing, 'Future in Mind', is a five-year strategic plan to deliver whole system change to children and young people’s emotional and mental health support and service provision in the borough.

The plan incorporates priorities from primary prevention through to specialist provision and focuses on improving both children and young people’s experience and outcomes.

The plan was originally published in November 2015 and in line with NHS England’s recommendations has been refreshed in October 2016, again in October 2017, October 2018 and most recently in October 2019. 

Click here to see the Barnsley Future in Mind long term plan - updated October 2019.

Click here to read about the progress being made on this plan.

Summary of the plan

Barnsley both welcomed and anticipated the opportunities provided by the Future in Mind report and have responded positively to its recommendations and associated national resource.

Led by Barnsley CCG a ‘Local Transformation Plan’ (LTP) Group, consisting of a range of key stakeholders, have worked collaboratively together to develop a transformation plan that will significantly improve the Emotional Well Being and Mental Health outcomes for the children and young people of Barnsley over the next 5 years and beyond.

The transformation plan has built on the extensive and robust consultation with children, young people and their families that commenced in 2013. Barnsley’s transformation plan builds on key remedial work we have been undertaking to improve access to local Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS)but more importantly prioritises prevention for their need at its heart.

The focus of transformation work in Barnsley will be to provide support to children and young people at the earliest possible time to prevent escalation of their problem(s) and to support their emotional health and wellbeing throughout their childhood and adolescence into adulthood.This reflects the focus on early help that is the cornerstone of our Children and Young People’s Trust Strategy Continuous Service Improvement work.

Reflecting our successful continuous service improvement work in the Children and Young People’s Trust, a whole-system approach will be embedded within Barnsley to ensure that appropriate support is provided, at the right time and in the right place, to ensure that children and young people develop resilience to be able to cope more effectively and that their environment continually nurtures positive emotional health and wellbeing.This includes work to support schools, parents, carers and other family members.

The outcomes delivered by the implementation of this transformation plan, driven by the Children and Young People’s Trust, will enable the children and young people of Barnsley to be more emotionally resilient and effectively supported to prevent reduced prevalence of escalation of any mental health problems they may have.

The enhancement of the key prevention work and early years support that will be delivered by implementation of this transformation plan will be fundamental in successfully supporting specialist services by enabling a sustainable reduction in overall demand, creating capacity and capability within the whole system.

The Children and Young  People’s Mental Health Taskforce published their recommendations to improve children and young people’s emotional health and wellbeing, in their report ‘Future in mind’ (March 2015). Local Transformation Plans set out how the nationally funded investments will be utilised in each area to implement the recommendations. Barnsley’s main aim is to promote emotional health and wellbeing and prevent mental ill health to reduce distress and demand for Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).

Barnsley’s national allocation is £ 512k and the Local Transformation Plan details the priority streams and allocated investment, as outlined below:

  • Development of an evidence-based community eating disorder service, collaboratively commissioned with Wakefield, Calderdale, Kirklees and Greater Huddersfield CCG’s.
  • Improve the resilience of primary school children via the roll-out of the THRIVE approach, otherwise referred to as ‘BETTER’[1]. This work is being led by Barnsley’s Public Health Team.
  • Develop lower level emotional health and wellbeing support to secondary school children via a school-led mental health therapeutic team – otherwise known as ‘BETTER PLUSSS’[2]
  • Increase school staff awareness of, and their ability to deal with, or appropriately signpost, children and young people who present with emotional health and wellbeing concerns. This is linked with the mental health therapeutic team (as stated in ‘3’ above) and will be undertaken via a number of training modules covering eating disorders, Therapeutic Interventions, Self-Harm, Attachment, Anxiety, ASD, Depression and ADHD .
  • Additional investment has been provided to the SWYPFT CAMHS service to enhance support to Looked After Children and to children and young people who access the Youth Offending Team. Further investment has also been provided to support the CAMHS Single Point of Access.
  • Investment has been made to improve children and young people’s awareness of the emotional health and wellbeing support available to them and to inform children and young people how to access each service should they need to.
  • We are working with Chilypep to understand how children and young people could be directly involved in the commissioning of children’s services and we are looking at how information could be better shared among the partner organisations to improve the commissioning process.
  • We continue to support SWYPFT CAMHS in improving children and young people’s access to psychological therapies. NHS England are funding £90k to backfill posts to ensure professionals access appropriate training.
  • Crisis care – mental health liaison services in emergency departments will be appropriately accessed by children and young people, plus s136 alternative Places of Safety will be considered, utilising national funding.

[1] Building Emotional Wellbeing Through Teacher Enabled Resilience

[2] Building Emotional Wellbeing Through Teacher Enabled Resilience Providing Low-key User-friendly Support to Secondary School Students