CAMHS is a set of specialist services (Child and Family Service; Inspire – children’s learning disability team) for young people of all abilities to support with mental health and psychological difficulties.
- We offer support to young people directly through talking therapies
- We work with parents and carers, and siblings
- We work with members of the wider care system (for example: teachers, care staff)
- We can work alongside others (this means that we will teach or support others to put the help in place with the young person)
- We also offer services through local health centres, GP surgeries and schools when this is more appropriate or convenient.
Our aim is to support the young person and the family in understanding, managing and ultimately improving their mental health.
Clinical work is not time limited but will be reviewed on a regular basis to ensure that there is still benefit to the work, a clear focus and that all involved are still happy for the agreed work to be provided.
The Child and Family Service is a specialist service within CAMHS for children who present with severe and enduring (longer term) mental health difficulties. Examples of these would be depression, anxiety, severe self-harm, suicide intent, hearing voices. Some of these young people may also have some specific learning difficulties (for example, dyslexia) but will not have a learning difficulty.
Inspire supports children with a learning disability. This part of CAMHS employs specialist staff who have expertise in working with young people with a learning disability. Inspire can offer support with mental health related difficulties, as the Child and Family Service also does, but in addition it is able to support with the following issues where universal or previous input has been unsuccessful and where the issue is related to the young person’s learning disability:
- physical health difficulties (for example, toileting; feeding)
- social skills difficulties (for example, how to manage friendships and relationships)
- general communication difficulties (for example, developing use of picture symbols)
CAMHS works with young people up to the age of 18yrs of age. To access CAMHS young people must:
- Be registered with a Wolverhampton GP
- To access the Child and Family Service they must have a long standing mental health difficulty that impacts upon their day to day lives
- To access Inspire they must have a learning disability and also be presenting with an emotional wellbeing or mental health issue, or have significant difficulties with feeding, sleep, continence or challenging behaviours.
When a young person is referred into CAMHS the request for support is reviewed to make sure that:
- The young person meets our criteria
- The young person’s needs couldn’t be met better somewhere else
- There has been some attempt to support the young person in the past
If a family move outside of Wolverhampton and they change their GP to a non-Wolverhampton GP then we would want to support a careful transition of support to the equivalent services local to where the family have moved to.