CYP Mental Health Inpatient and Community Pathway Training

The expansion of the children and young people’s mental health (CYP MH) workforce is delivered through a partnership involving NHS England & Improvement (NHSE/I), Health Education England (HEE), service commissioners and providers of NHS funded care and aligned to a number of key drivers which include:<br/>

• The Five Year Forward View (2016 – 2021)<br/>
• Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Provision: a Green Paper (2018)<br/>
• The NHS Long Term Plan (2019 – 2024)<br/>
• COVID-19 and recovery<br/>
• National Quality Improvement Taskforce for children and young people’s mental health inpatient services<br/><br/>The new Quality Improvement Taskforce for Children and Young People’s inpatient mental health services was announced in Oct 2019. The overarching aim of the Taskforce is to support improvements in the quality of CYP MH inpatient care to ensure services deliver safe, high-quality care that is timely, treatment-focused and outcomes based.<br/><br/>Further workforce growth for the CYP MH workforce will support the commitment in the NHS Long Term Plan to improve access to mental health services for an additional 345,000 children and young people by 2023/24.<br/><br/>NHS Benchmarking data from 2019 and 2020 highlighted that the mean CYP MH inpatient Length of Stay (LOS) in England is 67 days which continues to be at the higher end of the international range of benchmarking than the international mean value of 46 days. This results in a CYP General Adolescent Unit (GAU) admission which is twice as long as an acute adult mental health admission.<br/><br/>2020 data shows vacancy rates across all staff routes for CYP MH inpatient settings at 19% compared with 11% in community CYP MH services. Staffing costs are therefore impacted by increasing agency and bank staff costs across the inpatient pathway. <br/><br/>Whilst it is acknowledged that reduced reliance on agency, temporary, locum and bank staff will have a positive financial impact, more importantly there are other positive benefits associated with reduced reliance on temporary staffing. This includes a more stable and experienced workforce that can receive better supervision, ongoing lifelong professional development, improved staff morale and local connections and relationships can be forged to enable them to provide better care to children and young people. <br/><br/>Whilst there are a number of existing low-intensity psychological roles in the healthcare system, these staff do not have the specific psychological / mental health training to actively support some of the psychological interventions required for this specific cohort of CYP. <br/><br/>The training will ensure practitioners have the skills and knowledge to support the delivery of safe and effective care to young people who can be severely unwell and often have complex needs. This initiative will also contribute to reduced admissions and length of stay and reduce overall staff vacancy rates across the inpatient pathway.<br/><br/>The training will include support for supervisors of the new role, who will also be expected to make a transformation contribution in developing and establishing the role.<br/><br/>It is recognised that there are a number of existing education providers currently delivering training across a range of CYP MH and CYP IAPT pathways. This specification focuses on new training to be commissioned as part of a CYP MH Inpatient and Community Pathway New Role pilot. <br/><br/>A new national curriculum has been developed and it is expected that the new training will be aligned to the CYP MH Inpatient pathway training curriculum (which can be seen at Appendix 1) together with the Competence Framework for Staff Working in Children and Young People’s Inpatient Mental Health Services which builds on the UCL Competence Framework for Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services.