Youth workers to be recruited to mental health support teams
Nina Jacobs
Monday, August 20, 2018
Young people experiencing a mental health crisis in Greater Manchester will be offered around-the-clock support as part of a new care pathway involving a range of professionals.
The plans will see the creation of rapid response teams made up of mental health, youth work and social care practitioners to reach those young people in need of immediate help.
It is one of a number of transformation initiatives being established by Greater Manchester Health and Social Care Partnership, the body responsible for the region's devolved health and social care budget.
Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust, which was chosen by the partnership to lead on the programme, said it wanted to improve the experience and outcome for children and young people across all of Greater Manchester's 10 local authorities.
It said multi-agency teams being created under the pathway would help improve early identification of mental health issues among young people and ensure the right help could be offered.
The programme's long-term aim is to reduce the overall number of young people who require specialist mental health provision, it added.
Under the new pathway, mental health support for young people will be made available seven days a week either face-to-face, online or over the telephone and via pre-planned or drop-in sessions.
"The new Greater Manchester crisis offer is ambitious, large-scale and inclusive, holding young people and families at its core.
"We have a real opportunity to use the collective intelligence, experience and resources across GM to do this once and do it well," the trust said.
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As part of the agreement, the trust will work with other NHS professionals, but also those from the private sector as well as the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector.
The trust said several new teams were being developed to cover crisis outreach and response work, and to help further integration between existing services from health and social care.
A review of crisis services for children and young people in Greater Manchester found that while "considerable complex challenges" existed, many still offered good services and provided "strong foundations upon which to build".
However, the review revealed variable experiences for young people and their families, difficulties and delays in access, staff recruitment and retention problems and inconsistent information sharing across agencies.
The trust said transformation funding, as part of the devolution process, had created an opportunity for a "holistic, system-wide pathway".
"Faced with these complexities, it is tempting to simply narrow the scope of an offer and focus on addressing just part of the system such as responses to an acute crisis," the review said.
Such an approach left "larger systemic problems in place", but the new pathway was representative of a "culture shift from the needs of the organisation to the need of the young people", it added.
A historic devolution deal signed with the government in 2014 transferred responsibility to the partnership for the region's £6bn health and social care budget.
