What is Home Treatment?

Welcome to the CAMHS Crisis & Home Treatment Team Pathway.

We are a specialist service who provide intensive support for young people and families who need higher intensity community care for their mental health.

We aim to offer effective treatment, promote safety, and prevent/reduce admission to hospital where possible.

On average, we aim to see young people for 5-9 months. We will aim to start with a higher intensity of support, e.g. 2-3 contacts a week, and reduce this intensity as things settle down, and then have a planned handover with the CAMHS/adult team that will take over your care.

We generally deliver evidence-based treatment such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), personalised and adapted for your individual needs.

It is often helpful to work directly with young people and involve their parents/carers in a coaching role.

After you are discharged from home treatment, we complete a 3-month review, to see how things are going for you and your family.

Our data shows that most young people are doing better by the time we finish our work together, although most continue to need some form of support from CAMHS.

Timings

We will try to book in allocated days/times that are mutually convenient and try to keep consistently to those times/dates.

However, due to the nature of our work, and travelling around the county, there could be times when sessions are delayed or changed.

We try to minimise this as much as possible and will aim to inform you ahead of time if there are changes to appointments times etc.

Please let us know if predictable timings are particularly important to you and your family, and if there are specific limitations to your availability.

Where will we meet?

The sessions will usually take place at your home and sometimes out and about in the community.

Sometimes we see people in CAMHS clinics, especially if this feels more comfortable for the young person or if this is part of their goals.

We sometimes offer online sessions or telephone support in addition.

There are pros and cons to seeing young people in their homes. It is often the most comfortable, familiar, and manageable place to begin if someone is struggling with their mental health.

It can be the most effective place to begin especially if treatment is most needed in the home environment, e.g. if there are routines or rituals that need to be addressed.

It can be practical, and allow a young person and family to attend sessions, when they might not be able to attend a clinic setting e.g. if parents have other caring responsibilities, work commitments etc.

There can be downsides too.

For example, when talking about really tricky topics it might be helpful to have some separation from home, so that after the session you can leave the topic behind.

Depending on your home and who else is there, it might feel more private and comfortable to meet in a clinic.

If you have had difficulties attending health appointments, it might be part of our treatment to try and support you to be able to do so.

In these cases, we might recommend having sessions in a local clinic space e.g. CAMHS or GP base.

Some young people and families find it intrusive to have professionals in their home.

Please don’t worry; we are not here to judge but to support, and we will always aim to be respectful and considerate.

However, if you have any concerns or feel uncomfortable about home visits, please let your allocated clinicians know and we will do our best to adapt our treatment to suit you and your family.

Contact Details

• Our crisis number can be used 24/7 if you are requiring immediate support / help / advice: 01865 902576
• You can contact us via email, through our clinical emails (which we can provide you) or through our crisis admin inbox: OxonCrisisAdmin@oxfordhealth.nhs.uk

However, please be aware our emails and admin inbox are not monitored 24/7 and are not for immediate concerns/risks etc – therefore, we would prioritise using the crisis number for anything urgent, in addition to use of 999 if you feel you need to access immediate support.

Routine Outcome Measures, Reports and Formulations

As part of our home treatment intervention, we will also ask you to complete ROMs.

These consists of packs of questionnaires for parents/carers and the young person.

We may ask you to complete them at the start and the end of treatment.

This is to measure the effectiveness of the service we deliver, e.g. are your mental health problems getting better for you during our intervention.

Once we complete our intervention, we write a report; included in this will be your scores from your questionnaires, the intervention we offered you and a formulation.

A “formulation” basically means we are trying to help us understand what is going on for you and why, what was maintaining it, what’s important to you and how to break these cycles to ensure you stay well.

We will aim to show you and your family, your formulation during our intervention with you.

The report is sent to your GP, yourselves and the core professionals involved in your current care in CAMHS.