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Posted on 28 Jun 2017

Nottinghamshire Healthcare has recently launched a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) Liaison Service to help prevent avoidable admissions to hospital. The service will initially run as a pilot for six months and will then be reviewed.

The role of the new team, based at King’s Mill Hospital in Sutton in Ashfield, is to ensure under 18s are not admitted to hospital unnecessarily following self-harm, overdose, or thoughts of suicide. They are instead treated in the community, wherever possible.

The team will assess patients in A&E and where possible they will create a safe discharge plan with pre-arranged follow up from the team or from another CAMHS worker. The liaison nurses work closely with paediatric colleagues, community CAMHS teams, Social Care and other agencies as appropriate to ensure young people’s needs are met safely.

When admission is required for treatment or other reasons, the CAMHS Liaison Team will assess the patient on the ward once they are well enough, and aim to get them home and receiving support in the community as soon as possible.

Rebecca Keating, Team Lead, said:

“I am delighted that this funding has been made available to provide this service to support young people with urgent mental health needs. We want to ensure that young people experiencing a mental health crisis can be assessed as quickly as possible and the appropriate treatment and support put in place.  

“We believe this new service will offer high quality care and reduce admissions to hospital which will ultimately benefit young people.”

The pilot has been funded by Mansfield and Ashfield and Newark and Sherwood Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG).

The project started last month and will initially run until October 2017. After this time there will be an evaluation and review of the project.