(last updated Tuesday, 10 August 2010)


Emotional Health and Psychological Well-being

The Atkinson Secure Children’s Home benefits from a dedicated CAMHS in-reach team comprising a clinical psychologist and a CPN, who both spend a couple of days a week at the unit. We also have regular input from a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist. All the mental-health professionals work closely with our other visiting health staff, and staff at the home including education.

The primary role of CAMHS in-reach is to support our staff in looking after the very complex and often challenging everyday care needs of each young person who comes to live here. This includes, where appropriate, addressing acute presentations of mental health problems and monitoring young people’s mental health during their stay.

Evidence-based assessment is undertaken jointly with residential staff to inform an individualised programme of care and intervention that relies for its effectiveness on the quality of relationships formed between core staff-members and a young person.

This developmental perspective is based on analysis of key historical, biological and social factors that have most likely shaped and continue to maintain a young person’s difficult behaviour – including protective factors relevant to a young person and their social context.

Key-workers receive frequent, in-depth supervision from the CAMHS in-reach team, in support of their direct therapeutic work with young people. Where clinically indicated, the CAMHS in-reach team will also engage in their own direct therapeutic work with young people – although the emphasis remains on the joint development of psychological understanding of a young person’s needs across the whole staff group.

The home’s approach to working with young people secured under “welfare orders” is to help them to explore, as far as possible, their own understanding of the nature of risk that has led to them being secured, to help them see what other choices they may make in the future, and to help them practise new skills in living.

The primary objective of the Atkinson Secure Children’s Home is to provide, above all, a place of safety for young people. We aim to do this through creating an
environment which is physically and emotionally containing – where staff are predictable in their responses to young people, and where consistent boundaries around young people’s behaviour and social interaction are communicated and maintained.

All our practices are underpinned with restorative approaches to young peoples care and a ‘needs led approach’ to finding solutions for young people in crisis. We believe to do this effectively requires the full commitment of all staff at the home.

The CAMHS in-reach team does not undertake to provide formalised assessment reports for the courts. We recommend that each placing authority instructs its own professionals – usually a psychiatrist or psychologist from within their own CAMHS. If this is not possible or it is more beneficial, then we can recommend a specific independent visiting professional to carry out specialist assessment and write reports for the court process and to inform decision-making about exit-planning and future placements. CAMHS staff will happily discuss this with placing authorities when a young person is first placed, and will remain involved in the process of planning throughout a young person’s stay.

CAMHS