Strengthening Collaboration to Improve Young People’s Mental Health Outcomes

How can CAMHS, education providers, and health and social care departments work together more effectively to improve the mental health outcomes of children and young people?

Currently, children and young people in Liverpool, as in many parts of England, don’t always receive the right mental health support at the right time. Services can be fragmented, with health, social care, schools, and voluntary organisations often working in parallel rather than together. This means children, families, and professionals struggle to navigate the system and secure the right help.

In Liverpool, children, young people, and families can attend any of the three community-based early support YPAS hubs to help with a range of mental health and emotional well-being difficulties.

Some seek advice about services and what they offer; others seek practical advice; and some people are struggling with different feelings and emotions, which we would call a ‘self-defined’ crisis.

The service supports children and young people aged 10—25 and their families.

Research

We want to conduct research to demonstrate how Early Support Hubs (like YPAS) can improve joined-up care and outcomes for children and young people through strong school-based prevention and a whole-family approach. It will assess current partnership working, understand how hubs operate in practice, and explore how they align with other local services. By working with children, families, and staff, the project will co-design and test improvements to the hub model, measure their impact on access, experience, equity, and outcomes, and examine cost implications.

The findings will inform a practical national blueprint for joined-up care, alongside priorities for future research and commissioning.

This research will explore…

• How well partners work together to provide joined-up care.
• The involvement of children, young people and families and wider services in the design of further models to improve joined-up care and outcomes.
• Implementing improvements and seeing how these work to inform further, future developments.

Understanding how CAMHS, education providers, and health and social care departments work together more effectively to improve the mental health outcomes of children and young people is one of ten priorities set out by the John Lind Alliance.

We’ve set out a project approach to achieve this, but we’d like to know your thoughts about it.

We’d like to know two things…

• Do you agree that this research is important?
• How do you feel about our project approach?
  • The way we plan to involve children, young people, and families
  • Where and how the support we’re offering is available; and
  • How will we test what works?
  • What should we keep the same, change, or add?

How to respond

You let us know your thoughts by 9am Monday 19th January

by emailing The RAISE Mental Health Promotion Team mentalhealthpromotion@mya.org.uk

Accessibility & privacy: We welcome short or long answers, in any format. Please don’t include private clinical details; focus on your views and ideas. We’ll summarise feedback without names unless you ask us to include them.