Oxfordshire CAMHS Parent Carers Forum service update, March 2024

Our Oxfordshire Community Child and Adolescent Service update informs you of some of things that have been happening across our service since our previous update in January.

The service continues to be very busy, young people attended a total of 3,325 appointments across the whole of the CAMHS Oxfordshire Community Teams in January. We recorded 581 unattended appointments. We understand there are many reasons people are unable to make appointments, but we urge families to let our teams know as soon as they can if they are unable to make the appointments, so we can reallocate this time to another young person and family whilst offering you an alternative appointment.

When there are cancellations, teams will call families to offer a last-minute slot, we appreciate it does not suit all families, but many appreciate the opportunity.

Single Point of Access (SPA) Team

The SPA Team receives all requests for service for all young people, offering advice and signposting as part of the service.

The team have been very busy since young people returned from Christmas holidays and receive hundreds of requests for service per month, their job is to screen all requests individually to ensure the young person gains the right help.

This month the team have been working hard to reduce our response time for families, as the number of requests can be so unpredictable the team have to respond to whatever the need may be.

Getting Help/Getting More Help

• Our new Patient and Family/Carer Engagement Co-ordinator is in post, work is underway to develop what we can offer to children and young people as soon as they are accepted to CAMHS.
• As part of this project, an engagement offer is being designed for parents, caregivers, and young people to access to ensure they are getting the support when they need it and not waiting for advice.
• Two parents with experience of having been through CAMHS have been supporting to guide the whole project.
• In addition, there are parent peer support workers within the teams to have peer to peer support and voices of parents embedded into the teams.
• We are working with young people from the Unloc project, which is a forum of young people who give us feedback and support for what we are creating for engagement.

Our Outreach Team

• This team supports children and young people who have had difficulty in engaging with CAMHS teams and struggle to come into a clinic type environment.
• These young people often have more complex and long-term mental health needs and can be at high risk to themselves.
• We are a community-based team, often meeting young people in their local community or at home.
• We are a creative and flexible team using a young person’s interests to engage them in work to help address their mental health needs.
• We run a Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) programme. This is a talking therapy that supports young people to understand and accept difficult feelings they might have, helping to make positive changes in their lives.
• We are currently working on developing our website and leaflets, we hope to share this with you soon.

Autism and Learning Disability (LD) Liaison Team

• This team works with young people and their families who have Autism and/or LD and are at risk of admission to hospital or at risk of losing their home if they are in alternative living arrangements. We meet the young person, family, and professional network to understand the young person’s journey through services. The needs and wishes of the family and gaps in service provision.
• We are a non-clinical team, which means we do not provide health-based interventions but will work alongside all those involved to advocate and address barriers to care.
• We hold the ‘Dynamic Support Register’, more commonly called the ‘DSR’, for Oxfordshire children and young people. This is a register that helps us identify those children and young people at risk of hospital admission or placement breakdown. The DSR helps us make sure there is the right support and treatment in place from Health, Social Care and Education. Everyone on the DSR has to give consent.
• We are currently working on developing our website and leaflets, we hope to share this with you soon.

Neuro Developmental Conditions (NDC)

We are aware of the long waiting times within the service. We have recently been given some additional funds to add to the support available for young people waiting for an assessment. We will be working with one of our partner charities, Autism Champions, to provide this. This will add to the ‘Living well with

Neurodiversity’ offer which is available for families to access support and is useful for those waiting. This is currently open to those who are known to CAMHS services, with suspected autism and/or ADHD. More information: https://onhs.autismoxford.com.

In partnership with the Parent Carer Forum, the NDC team hosted four monthly webinars, the topics were:

• Journey of what to expect from the CAMHS NDC service following a referral.
• Anxiety and emotional regulation.
• Sensory challenges.
• Challenges with eating.

There was overwhelmingly positive feedback from these webinars, over 500 parents attended. We are planning to deliver a summer webinar series and currently doing a scoping exercise to decide on the content. These will be advertised on our website and in our upcoming service updates.

The NDC ‘SHaRON’ our new Support Hope and Recovery/Resources Online Network will be launching in mid-April -more information of how to access will be advertised on our website and shared with the Parent Carer Forum. This will be available for all of the parents/carers with children and young people open to our NDC service.

We are pleased to be continuing our partnership with the ‘OWL’ Centre to help us complete several of our autism and ADHD assessments. This has really been making a difference to our current service capacity. We are receiving very positive experience feedback from our families who are being seen by them. More information about them here: https://theowltherapycentre.co.uk.

We are always looking for ways to increase participation and feedback, a referral draft form was trialled by OXPCF families.

There continues to be significant shortages of ADHD medication, the medications and strengths change on a weekly basis. We are working hard to support the young people on these medications, only initiating anyone on these medications where there is significant risk which outweighs the risk of not being able to continue.

Eating disorders team

To support Eating Disorder Awareness Week, on 28 February the Oxford CAMHS Child Adolescent Eating Disorder service hosted a training conference at Kassam conference centre. 100 attendees from mental health teams, inpatient settings, schools, social care, and other agencies joined the fantastic day. The topic was ‘Not all eating disorders look the same’. Speakers included four experts by experience and professional experts in the field of eating disorders and Autism.

The feedback demonstrated the day was a great success, it gave the opportunity for shared learning and increasing awareness. The Oxford CAMHS Child and Adolescent Eating Disorder service do plan to host the 3rd annual training conference in 2025.

Learning Disability (LD) CAMHS

• The team are developing the LD CAMHS website resources for children and young people, families, and colleagues.
• They are planning to develop videos and webinar training alongside the website resources.
• Monthly meetings have been introduced with school transport to resolve issues for children and young people being able to travel safely to and from school.
• We are pleased to say after lots of hard work within the team there is a reduction in our waiting list.

Anxiety and Depression in Young People (AnDY clinic)

The new research clinic for Anxiety and Depression in Young People (AnDY clinic) will be taking patients soon, we are working towards a launch event in early Autumn.

The aim of this clinic is to develop targeted, effective, and accessible mental health interventions that meet the needs of diverse children and young people aged 5 – 18 years. They will be doing this through assessment and brief psychological treatments for anxiety and depression in young people. They are fully integrated with the rest of the CAMHS services.

The clinic will be aiming to also develop programmes and undertake research on online intervention, interventions for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and those who are neurodiverse.

School in reach

The school in reach service have been running a series of successful webinars for parents of young people, covering a range of topics. More sessions have been added, available to attend until June 2024.

Other updates

We are really keen to increase the attendance of the parent and carer support group ‘Walking With You’. We are open to any feedback or suggestions on how we can make this better. If you would be interested in volunteering or helping us to plan and facilitate the group, please contact Ffion at wwyoxon@oxfordhealth.nhs.uk.

The main way we gather feedback from people who access our service is through iWantGreatCare. You will find QR codes with links to the feedback surveys for the individual teams you are accessing on their communications, such the bottom of emails, any correspondence or posters. You can also request paper copies, or use the app. The more feedback we receive, the more we can respond. We are working towards gathering this feedback and letting you know how we progress by displaying ‘You said, we did’ information in our waiting areas.

We are pleased to share two upcoming developments to further support families, aimed at communicating with parents and carers. We are working on setting up a text messaging system so we can check in with families who are waiting for a service. We are also launching a new social media online parent support platform called SHaRON in late Spring 2024. This allows parents to connect and support each other on a safe online platform.

Getting involved

We are always looking for parents, carers, and young people to get involved and help us improve our services. The commitment could be as big or little as you like, and we pay people for their time.

If you would like to find out more, please contact us at getinvolved@oxfordhealth.nhs.uk. Ask to be linked with the CAMHS Experience and Involvement Lead Ffion Gore.

For any young person who may be nervous about getting involved, Ffion is happy to meet with them at a place of their choice to explain what it entails and how participation and co-production works.