Children in mental health wards 'missed-out on support during lockdown'
Joe Lepper
Thursday, October 22, 2020
Children detained in hospital mental health wards during lockdown struggled to access family therapy and advocacy support, the children’s commissioner for England has warned.
Children’s commissioner Anne Longfield says visits to children on mental health wards from outside professionals, such as therapy and advocacy, have “dropped alarmingly”.
While some of these services have adapted to working remotely, to adhere to social distancing guidelines, “online support will often not be an adequate substitute for engaging with children experiencing severe difficulties”, said Longfield.
The comments come as part of a report published this week into the experiences of children on mental health wards amid the Covid-19 crisis.
It details how usually wards have visits from professionals, such as family therapists who are not part of the core ward team, to provide additional therapeutic services or activities.
But amid the pandemic, visits by these professionals fell by 39 per cent, compared to before the crisis.
The biggest fall has been in fitness specialists (64 per cent decline) and family therapists (41 per cent drop).
Art therapy, speech and language support and dietary advice are among other services to see a drop in visits.
Meanwhile, there was a 67 per cent fall in the number of advocates attending wards to visit children amid the pandemic. Just under two thirds of wards went from having one or more advocates pre-lockdown to none during lockdown.
Children in some wards were already struggling to access any advocacy support, with 13 per cent of wards reporting not having an advocate visit to the ward prior to March this year.
We surveyed impatient mental health ward managers, and spoke to staff and children in two wards to see how Covid-19 and lockdown has affected their hospital experiences https://t.co/epjwS2psMI
— Children's Commissioner for England (@ChildrensComm) October 21, 2020
“This is particularly concerning when things are likely to have been even more difficult for children, and they may have needed to have their concerns heard more than ever,” states Longfield’s report.
She added: “The children on these wards are living with severe mental health disorders, like eating disorders or severe depression and are in hospital because they need more intensive level of care than is possible in the community – often to keep them physically safe from harming themselves.
“Nevertheless, being in hospital away from home, friends and family and with other children in distress can be traumatic for children."
Her report also raised concerns around the quality of care, in particular that too many children are spending months, even years, as mental health in-patients. This is often unnecessary as there is nowhere else suitable for them to move to, Longfield warns.
Another concern is a lack of access to education. Some wards said that their education providers “went into lockdown and so would not visit the ward at all”. While others reported that education of children was maintained throughout lockdown.
Of the 53 wards that provided information about education, 28 said they were able to continue face-to-face education, while 25 said this had been suspended for at least some of the time.
Kamena Dorling, head of policy and advocacy at children’s rights charity Article 39 said this was “an important report” that echoed many of its calls to protect the rights of children in mental health in-patient care.
“Every child detained in hospital has a right to an advocate, and we urge both NHS England and the Care Quality Commission to be more proactive in ensuring this essential safeguard is in place,” she added.
Meanwhile, a separate report released this week found that around a third (36 per cent) of child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) have not adopted any new digital mental health support for children amid Covid-19.
Manjul Rathee, chief executive of digital therapy firm BfB Labs, which compiled the report, said: “The pandemic demands an imperative to make digital mental health therapeutics a routine part of early access and early intervention.”
In addition, it emerged this week that one in six children in England may have a mental disorder, according to survey from July, published by NHS Digital. This also found that the rate has risen in boys aged five to 16 from 11.4 per cent in 2017 to 16.7 per cent this year.
