Originally posted on Community Practitioner – 6th June 2016
Those of you who know me could assume that I’ve only got one ‘week’ in my mind at the moment. When I announced #HVweek in December 2015 it felt like I had an eternity to put all the plans together but there are now just 16 weeks until 26 September. But today I’m thinking about the two ‘weeks’ that start today.
The first is a regular in the calendar with the Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT) hosting their Child Safety Week. During the week the charity raises awareness of the accidents that seriously injure or kill children and how to prevent them. On the website you can find lots of resources to download with a focus on ‘Turn off technology‘.
The other ‘week’ is a newbie in the calendar of events, but I’m sure that it will become a repeated event. The inaugural Infant Mental Health Awareness Week (#IMHAW16) has at its core the wish to continue the conversation about the importance of the First 1,001 days: Conception to age 2.
I’m sure for our community nursery nurse, school nurse and health visitor members there’s no need to justify the importance of the subject. Sadly, for many outside of these important professions, we as a society aren’t getting it right yet.
Hopefully you’ve had chance to see the briefing that I published a couple of weeks ago that gave some thoughts on the current situation of health visiting in England. You’ll see in it concerns about the current direction of travel that we’re going in where local authorities are looking in many areas to reduce the numbers of health visitors to try to balance the budgets. How does this match with the need to invest in early intervention?
Health Education England published a helpful framework entitled ‘Specialist health visitors in perinatal and infant mental health: What they do and why they matter‘.
There are a couple of key questions: how many areas will implement this framework and how will the success of this framework be measured (both in terms of whether it’s been implemented and the impact its implementation has)?
My own feedback so far since the framework’s publication is that I’ve already been contacted by one representative supporting one such perinatal specialist health visitor who has faced the risk of redundancy and return to the generic health visiting pot. It would be great to get our members feedback about their own experiences, so as always, stay in touch.
If we get the issue of early intervention right then maybe in future we’ll need less of a reliance on services such as CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services).
However, the CAMHS service we have now is under great strain. Just over a week ago Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner in England, produced a report following her Lightning Review, which looked at access to CAMHS. It didn’t make for good reading.
Longfield highlighted a particular concern that of the 3,000 children and young people she heard about who were referred to CAMHS with a life-threatening condition, 14% were not allocated any provision, 51% went on a waiting list and some of those on the waiting list had to wait over 112 days to receive a service. If we imagined this length of delay, for example, for someone with a broken leg or having a heart attack, we’d find this unacceptable. On a side note, Longfield’s next Lightning Review is on school nursing, so please do contribute to the survey if you’re a school nurse.
I wanted to finish by saying how pleased we are at Unite/CPHVA to be a primary sponsor of #IMHAW16 and wish PIP UK all the best with the first of, what I am sure, will be many more Infant Mental Health Awareness Weeks.
adaywithdave 