Salford Adolescent Minds (S.A.M) Report
The Healthwatch Salford priorities survey from January 2022 yielded a significant amount of feedback about Salford CAMHS and Salford’s neurodevelopment pathway (12 mentions from 81 completed surveys). It was therefore decided that this would be developed into a future project.
A scoping exercise took place over February – June 2023, in order to gather up-to-date research on the current situation. We met with commissioners of young people’s mental health services, the neurodevelopment pathway lead and two carers groups (Salford Parent Carer Forum and Carers Together Salford) so we could understand changes that were occurring within the service and gather up-to-date experiences. Since the service is still undergoing many changes, the decision was made to focus on capturing a snapshot of families’ experiences at this point in time. We decided to talk to young people, their parent carers and also the staff working within young people’s mental health services.
Summary of Key Recommendations:
- Ensure clear communication on the criteria to access the various young people’s mental health services.
- Improve signposting both before and immediately after a referral.
- Increase promotion of existing peer support groups/buddy systems and explore the need for further groups.
- Increase training for staff in hospital wards to support CYP who are/might be neurodivergent.
- Implement immediate support and counselling provisions for any parent whose CYP has attempted suicide.
- Conduct further analysis on neurodivergence amongst girls in school.
- Implement some kind of traffic light system for referrals into CAMHS (if it isn’t used already).
- Consider the development of four key projects when the CAMHS participation group is relaunched.
- Conduct further analysis of the cases where families were signposted from CAMHS to other support and ended up back at CAMHS.
Downloads
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Healthwatch Salford ran a competition for a young person to design the front cover of the report. The winning entry was designed by Llewelyn Ferguson aged 9, and Deryn Ferguson aged 5, with their quote “Let’s make grown-ups treat children’s mental health and well-being just like theirs!”
