Everyone involved in delivering Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) has a role to play in realising this vision.

Question: How can this vision be realised?

Click here for the answer.

Everyone involved in delivering Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) has a role to play in realising this vision.

Question: How can this vision be realised?

Answer:

• Services should intervene early and deliver assessments (including specialised and complex assessments) to enable treatment to begin
• Commissioners in the NHS and local authority are responsible for agreeing acceptable waiting times for all the services they commission for children and families
• No child or young person should then wait longer than has been agreed to receive the care, intervention or treatment that has been planned
• CAMHS must be accessible to all; access should not be determined by who the referring agency is or which professional the young person sees
• Pathways for accessing services should always be clear to families, and the maximum waiting times for each stage of the pathway should be specified and explicit
• Services should adopt recording and tracking systems to support achievement of agreed standards. These should be comprehensible to administrative and clinical staff