Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services

The problems of children and adolescents are of major concern to planners and providers of services within health and social care. When assuming responsibility for these services, at whatever level (policy, strategy, commissioning, or providing) they become aware of the major challenges that face them. Few people, however, are aware of the considerable amount of evidence that has already been accumulated in the last 50 years about effectiveness and the circumstances that impact on how best to deliver services. This book is the first to bring together this substantial body of evidence, disseminating in one volume information usually found scattered throughout a vast range of publications. In 38 chapters, it provides advice on: (a) The background developments in policymaking, strategic thinking, and adult education that impact on the future roles of professionals, managers, and child and adolescent health services. (b) Identifying problem populations and devising effective methods for obtaining reliable and valid measures of need that will enable service planning to take place, and which will then promote developments of commissioning strategies that make sense to practitioners. (c) Learning lessons for and from not only the UK but also North America, Australasia, developing countries, and societies that are in recovery post-conflict. (d) Understanding the evidence base for current interventions so that informed choices can be made, particularly in relation to expensive and residential provisions. (e) Understanding service networks so that children and families are directed to services that are likely to have the optimal effect in relation to their identified needs. (f) How services are currently being mapped and what recent exercise tell us about the performance of state-funded services in the UK (g) What we know from international sources about: how the impact of mental health problems and disorders on younger people translates into burden on parents, families, carers, and primary level staff; how their experiences relate to demand for and on specialist child and adolescents mental health services; and what the literature tells us about demand management. (h) Understanding the criteria for service evaluation so that reliable benchmarks and standards of effectiveness in services can be developed and applied. (i) Surveying the developments that have occurred in services in the last 15 years and future directions. Each chapter is written by an expert...