Archived decisions

STAGE TWO OF THE CHILD AND ADOLESCENT MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES' CHILDREN'S TRUST PARTNERSHIP

1. Hampshire's Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) Children's Trust is a partnership between Hampshire County Council's Children's Services Department and the Primary Care Trusts located in Hampshire. The Children's Trust seeks to improve CAMHS services for children and young people and to act as a pathfinder for integrated working across children's services. When the Trust was established in 2004, its development was to be in two stages. The first stage being to establish a planning and commissioning structure to support a Children's Trust approach so as to develop partnerships, clear governance roles and accountability to improve the outcomes for children and young people. The second stage was to further develop this work and to create a wider commissioning Trust. The Executive Lead Member has endorsed the development of this second stage of the partnership which will continue, those arrangements previously reached with the Primary Care Trusts in Hampshire.

2. The additional benefits of the second stage will be to :-

· simplify, streamline and standardise the existing complex array of commissioning procedures, ensuring a consistent approach to commissioning;


· enable greater equity and focus on community needs and consistent monitoring of outcomes for children;


· enable economies of scale, creating greater efficiency and flexibility to purchase needs-led services which prevent duplication and unnecessary division between the agencies;


· increase early intervention, improve planning and create joint developments to address high cost non-county and in-patient placements, ultimately reducing the numbers of children requiring this level of intervention and cost in this area;


· enable partners to share commissioning costs for required targeted services which would be too costly to commission by any one agency alone;


· increase expertise in CAMHS commissioning with dedicated commissioning time to this service;


· inform wider developments within Children's Services and CAMHS across the country.

3. The decision will increase the ability of children to be cared for safely within their extended family and community and attend, enjoy and achieve at school. Also, it will seek to ensure that children and young people are healthy, emotionally confident and maintain meaningful relationships. This supports the Council's Corporate priorities.