Mental health professionals 'must promote their work to commissioners'

Professor Sue Bailey, who started her three-year term of office as president of the college last week, told CYP Now that CAMHS workers must use the NHS reforms to boost investment in child and adolescent mental health and embrace the public health agenda.

"CAMHS need to get out there and go and speak to the health and wellbeing boards and clinical commissioners about what they’re doing and what benefit it is for children at risk of developing a mental illness," she said. "They’ve got to talk about the great outcomes they achieve and why they are worth it. Every CAMHS team needs someone who is in on that clinical commissioning alongside GPs.

"We’ve got an irrefutable scientific argument for investment in CAMHS, in that half of lifetime mental illnesses start by the age of 14 and two-thirds by the age of 22."

One of Bailey’s key priorities during her term as president will be to protect psychiatric services from cuts.

"It is vital that services for people with mental illness are not eroded during this period of economic restraint," she explained. "We know that mental illness is associated with great risk of physical illness, and vice versa. Promoting mental health can bring great health, social and economic benefits across all sectors of society."

She said the college is planning to research the full extent of cuts to psychiatric posts in CAMHS, since current evidence on job losses is anecdotal.

"We are getting the sense that when professionals are coming to the end of their career, there is a now a tendency to put in locum posts and then if another person retires then two posts are just being replaced by one," she said. "We’re looking into doing some research to evidence that."

Another of Bailey’s presidential priorities will be to champion work with whole families, to improve the mental health and emotional wellbeing of both children and adults.

"I’d like to see mental health trusts working better across families in a way that makes sense to the families themselves, so mothers aren’t having to take children to different clinics," she said.

Bailey also hopes to use her presidency to highlight inequalities in health and social care for vulnerable groups, including children and people with learning disabilities and to promote the importance of research into mental illness and learning disability.

Bailey is consultant child and adolescent forensic psychiatrist in the Forensic Adolescent Consultation & Treatment Services (Facts) at Greater Manchester West Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust. She succeeds Professor Dinesh Bhugra, who became president of the college in 2008.