Long wait times for children's mental health services in Northants declining

Wait times for children trying to access treatment within child mental health services in Northamptonshire have halved since last year, but still sit at around six months on average.

According to figures given to a meeting of West Northamptonshire Council's (WNC) Children Education and Housing Scrutiny Committee, wait times are decreasing overall in the authority. At peak demand in April 2022, children were waiting more than four months on average between referral and receiving an initial appointment for CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health services). That wait time has now dropped down to six weeks.

The number of young people waiting to be seen each month is also on the decline as the waiting list length reportedly decreased by 63 per cent between April 2022 and January 2024.

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However, West Northants councillor Nick Sturges-Alex raised his own concerns as a foster carer, saying he "didn't recognise" the figures as his own experience of teenagers being able to access mental health services.

"Every time we try to approach many different services for help, we're faced with a very long queue. It was almost 'join the queue because we'll never see them'. We've never found a child, apart from a child in absolute dire crisis, that's managed to get help on the service."

He asked if the triage service 'masked' wait times to appear better than they are because people were being seen for preliminary assessments fairly quickly, but facing long queues afterwards to actually receive targetted mental health services and treatment programmes.

Daniel Holling, Deputy Director of Children's Services at the Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (NHFT) responded: "Absolutely, there's a distinction between initial wait times and secondary wait times. I'm happy to say that at the moment for CAMHS Communities both of those have seen significant improvement over the last 12 months."

He told the committee that the secondary wait time for intervention after the initial assessment is, on average, 30 weeks (more than six months). This is down from an average secondary wait time of 62 weeks this time last year.

Director of Strategy at the NHFT David Williams said: "Waiting times are important to us. They're absolutely something that we focus on and something that we do look at all the time. Getting help earlier is a really important part of the whole wide system.

"There's an awful lot that we can do as communities which is also about managing isolation. The work that schools do is really really important. CAMHS is part of the children and young person's wellbeing services- it's not all of those services. Hopefully, with that focus on intervention and that focus on partnership working we'll feel that strong way of working that we're really pleased to be a part of."

Other organisations highlighted offering mental health support include the Northampton Saints Foundation and wellbeing cafes, which run six days a week across Northamptonshire, supporting around 100-200 young people and their families each month. Online support service iDiscover also has a number of resources to help support young people and is immediately accessible, with no waiting lists.

The meeting also heard that funding has just been secured for a new 'digital front door' to help people navigate through the many mental health services on offer in the county a central platform. Timescales are still to be confirmed, but it was suggested that it could be rolled out as early as next year.