Short title: CAMHS Inpatient Referral Study
(CIRS)
Funded by: Policy Research Programme in the Department
of Health
Ethical approval reference: MREC 03/4/078
Final
Report
Appendices
A. 1 attached to the
final report
A. 2 attached to the final report
A.
3 Data Collection Tools
A.
4.1 A 55 kg paper mountain: The impact of new
research governance and ethics processes on mental health
services research in
England.
A.
4.2 Provision of child and adolescent mental health
in-patient services in England between 1999 and 2006
A.
5.1 CAMHS in North Central London SHA
A. 5.2 CAMHS in Norffolk, Suffolk and Caimbridge SHA
Background:
The Government has pledged to meet the mental
health needs of all young people and committed to put in place
comprehensive child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS)
by 2006. Inpatient (IP) mental health care is an important
part of this provision. Despite this, there is some evidence
that a proportion of young people who are referred to IP CAMHS are
denied admission because of a lack of available beds in an
appropriate setting. One consequence of this is that at least
one-third of all admissions of young people for the treatment of a
mental disorder are to an adult psychiatric ward or paediatric
ward. The new amendments to the 1983 Mental Health Act
(Mental Health Act, 2007-Section 31) require that, in future, young
people are only admitted to an age appropriate environment.
Research question:
To explore what happens to young people who are referred but not
admitted to inpatient CAMHS, we aimed to examine:
a) The demand for adolescent CAMHS
beds in areas of England with high and low provision of IP
CAMHS.
b) The reasons for admission and
non-admission,
c) The care paths of those not
admitted
d) The care path experiences of
those not admitted and their parents
e) Factors that influenced
decisions to admit
f) Agreement among
clinicians about the criteria that constitutes ‘appropriateness’
for admission.