Mental Health Services: Children and Adolescents (Hansard, 8 June 2004)

§ Baroness Andrews
My Lords, local health and social services partnerships are working to achieve the targets set out by the Department of Health in our public service agreement and priorities and planning framework, assisted by the £300 million provided in the three years to March 2006 to increase capacity and reduce inequalities. Future developments will be determined by recommendations in the National Service Framework for Children, which is due to be published later this year.

§ Baroness Massey of Darwen
My Lords, I thank my noble friend for that reply. Would she agree that, sometimes at a local level, the services are not adequate or given sufficient prominence? Will she give examples of good practice at a local level that might be replicated?

§ Baroness Andrews
My Lords, 10 years ago, mental health services for children were nowhere on the political map, and the situation is now very different. One of the most difficult challenges is to get local authorities to work closely with health and education services, and we are beginning to see them do so. As the noble Baroness may know, the emerging framework of the National Service Framework for Children, which was published last year, set out a draft children and adult mental health service plan that local authorities could follow. It was a comprehensive plan for children's services, and they are beginning to follow it. It has a very heavy emphasis on partnership. The emerging framework spends pages talking about good partnership, what it should look like and how it should be achieved.

§ Lord Clement-Jones
My Lords, does the Minister agree that the issue is very broad? She will no doubt have seen the latest WHO study of more than 150,000 young people, which found that teenagers in England in particular, but also their counterparts in Scotland and Wales, have some of the highest rates of drinking, smoking, drug use and underage sex, and the lowest levels of life satisfaction. That is the root of some of the problems under discussion. What are the Government doing to work in conjunction with the Health Development Agency, particularly in schools, to try to root out some of the problems before they arise in the acute form?

§ Baroness Andrews
My Lords, the WHO paints a rather dire picture. There has recently been a positive development in respect of schools. The National Healthy Schools Standard has published its module on promoting emotional health and well-being as part of the PSHE curriculum as a whole. We need to pay a great deal more attention to promoting positive mental health throughout the curriculum, and that is a place to start.
I shall deal with how we are responding to adolescent crises. We have created 41 early intervention teams to pick up early signs of psychosis, follow through with families, and provide the support to make sure that those young people are treated early. That will help a great deal. It does not deal with the preventive aspect, but it is a response that we need to make. In terms of what we do about the psychological health of our young people, we do not just start with mental health services, it goes very far back to family support during early development.

§ The Earl of Listowel
My Lords, is the Minister aware of the report last week from the Office for National Statistics that about half of the children in public care in Wales and Scotland have a mental health disorder? Are the one in four such children who are now fostered outside their local authority getting proper access to child and adolescent mental health services? Will she undertake to check that there are adequate relations between local primary care trusts and out of authority CAMH services?

§ Baroness Andrews
Yes, my Lords, it is a serious problem because children who are taken into care, 140 whether foster care or residential care, come with a history of trauma, abuse or neglect which sets them apart from other children. They have to be provided for properly. There is a series of innovative projects on children and adolescent mental health services being funded by the Department of Health that has just come to a conclusion. Many of those projects address the issue of children in care.
In terms of foster care, what we are doing to train foster carers and to enable them to draw on services in a more positive way will help a great deal, as will what we are doing in schools with designated teachers. I am absolutely sure that there is more that we should be doing. We should be closely watching the Quality Protects and Choice Protects programmes to make sure that they pick up on this.

§ Lord Turnberg
My Lords, I am sure that my noble friend the Minister is aware that yesterday saw the launch of the Mental Health Research Network. Can she confirm that research into children's mental illnesses will be included in its portfolio and that funding will be made available for that purpose?

§ Baroness Andrews
My Lords, the Mental Health Research Network will act as a host to partnership arrangements to promote high quality research on mental health across all age groups. So I am sure that there will be reference to children. It means that we can conduct bigger research studies that will involve more clinicians, researchers and so on. I should also tell my noble friend—I am sure that he has not forgotten, because it was such good news—that we have announced £100 million over the next four years, £25 million a year, to develop medical research. Two of the four priority groups will be medicines for children and mental health. So, we are looking to more activity in that field.

§ Baroness Masham of Ilton
My Lords, does the Minister agree with me that adolescents often fall between the adults and the children as far as services are concerned? Will she tell the House if there are enough services and beds in this country for those people with eating problems such as anorexia?

§ Baroness Andrews
My Lords, I cannot answer the last question. I do not think that I could ever answer a question which asked me whether there was enough of anything, particularly in mental health services. However, the noble Baroness is right to draw attention to the particular problems that occur with 16 and 17 year-olds, because often local authorities will provide well up to the age of 16 and then expect the adult services to take up the 16 to 18 year-olds, although some do not. The 16 and 17 year-olds sometimes fall into that gap, which is totally unacceptable. We expect the National Service Framework for Children to ensure that we have proper, coherent services that are accountable and which provide across that age group, because the answer to psychosis often lies with young people aged 16 and 17.