Barnsley CAMHS helps secure £2.7m investment
The Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) in Barnsley has helped secure £2.7m of investment from the Department of Health to deliver innovative training to therapists and clinical leaders.
The service, which is provided by South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, was part of a collaborative bid to access funding to boost children and young people’s mental health therapy.
The collaborative comprises of Salford Cognitive Therapy Training Centre in partnership with The University of Manchester as the Higher Education Institute (HEI), Central Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust and Derbyshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
As a result of the funding Salford Cognitive Therapy Training Centre, which covers North Pennine, South Pennine, Manchester & Salford, Derby and Barnsley, will become one of only three new learning collaboratives in the country to deliver this innovative training for CAMHS.
The investment is part of the Government’s Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) Project. The project will see an investment of £32m over the next four years to transform services for children and young people’s mental health.
The project will improve the availability of psychological or "talking" therapies for children and young people with mental health problems, focusing on children from three to eight years with behavioural problems and Conduct Disorder, and children and teenagers from eight to 18 years with depression and/or anxiety disorders.
The new approach will see whole services, not just trainee therapists, use session by session outcome monitoring and improving access to services.
The Government asked universities and teaching providers to link up with local CAMHS to form partnerships that will transform services for children and young people.
The collaborative will train a proportion of their workforce to deliver evidence based talking therapies in the form of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and parenting training. In addition, training will be provided for service leads to help them transform CAMHS and for clinical supervisors to ensure the trainees receive the highest quality clinical supervision.
Janet Foster, service manager for CAMHS in Barnsley, said, “We are delighted to have the opportunity to be at the forefront of such an important service development. Children and young people deserve to be treated by highly skilled and well trained professionals, who use effective evidenced based approaches and tools such as CBT and Parenting.
"Children and Young Peoples IAPT project will help our service as we work toward increasing access to the service and by monitoring our effectiveness using outcome measures and within a robust framework of services user participation.”