Joint Strategic Needs Assessment – Hereford

The recent Herefordshire Mental Health Needs Assessment (March 2015) is a key document in understanding the needs of children and young people and mental health. The assessment involved extensive engagement of children and young people to understand their experience, their aspirations and things that need to change or improve. The report concluded that there was a need to:

  • Enhance tiers 1 and 2 support for children and young people
  • Improve the availability and quality of information available on mental health and well-being to 
young people, parents and carers
  • Improve professionals’ knowledge and awareness of the signs and symptoms of mental health, 
tiers of need, thresholds and referral routes
  • Improve collaboration between service providers in the identification and response to 
emotional health, well-being and mental health need
  • Development of a comprehensive referral care pathway using a ‘stepped’ model
  • Develop a programme of reform and transformation in response to the engagement of children, 
young people and their families that contributed 450 hours to the needs assessment development.

Children and Young People’s Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies Steering Group

The CYP-IAPT steering group is responsible for overseeing the development and achievement of the key principles of the CYP-IAPT programme as Herefordshire is a wave 4 area. The steering group is made up of local organisations and looks at:

  • Improving Access
  • The introduction and rollout of routine outcome measurements
  • The innovative development and use of information technology
  • Self-Referral
  • The participation of children, young people and their parents and carers.

The Herefordshire CYP-IAPT partnership will enter its third year in 2017 supported by a part-time coordinator and part-time participation worker there has been significant progress in workforce development over the first two years with take up of Parenting, Systemic Family Practice and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy training.

Additional support has been provided by Exeter University with ROMS and Supervision training. Two members have staff have benefited from the leadership training with a third place requested for training in 2017 along with supervisor training and additional CBT and SFP numbers for 2017. Practitioner training for 2017 will be through recruit to train funding.

There is interest in the new curricula including the development of Psychological wellbeing Practitioner training. The development of practitioners has enabled additional therapy to be offered to young people in Herefordshire, typically those with anxiety /depression/ or phobias. With additional students graduating in December 2016 more young people will be able to benefit from this approach. There are outstanding issues to progress in relation to the submission of data NHS digital and this is a priority area for the partnership to resolve.