Blueprint:Service Design for Children & Young People's Mental HealthV1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Blueprint: Developing a model for high quality service design for children and young people with common mental health problems
IRAS ID
272762
Contact name
Steven Pryjmachuk
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Manchester
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 4 months, 31 days
Research summary
Summary of Research
The mental health of children and young people is a national and international priority, with around one in ten in the UK having a mental health difficulty that requires professional help. Most of this need lies with children and young people experiencing ‘common’ mental health problem such as anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, self-harm, psychological trauma, problems with emotions and behaviour that are often called ‘personality disorder’, ADHD and substance misuse.More children and young people with common mental health problems are asking for help (or their parents, carers or teachers are) but it is often difficult to get help because services do not exist, are oversubscribed or depend on where the service user lives. When a service is available and used, it may turn out to be poor quality or unsuitable for the service user.
In the Blueprint study we want to explore the services available in England & Wales. Most of these services will be community or out-patient services. We want to find out what services exist, how children, young people and their families/carers find out about and access these services, what the services actually do, whether they are any good, and whether they offer value for money.
To do this we will identify 8-10 services across England and Wales from our earlier mapping exercise and study them in-depth using case study methodology. This will include talking to service users (children, young people and their families/carers), staff and managers in each service. We plan to take some young adult service users, who we will train as ‘co-researchers’, with us when we visit these services. We expect to speak to between 80 and 140 participants in total and use a range of methods including interviews, focus groups, documentary review and observations. We will analyse our data using the Framework approach.
Summary of Results
Blueprint is a research study exploring mental health services for children and young people with ‘common’ mental health problems like depression, anxiety and self-harm. Blueprint aimed to find out what services exist, how children/young people and their families find out about and access these services, what the services actually do, and whether they are any good and offer value for money.
To do this, we looked at the international literature (reports and research papers) to identify different approaches to providing support, and to find out whether some approaches worked better than others and whether children/young people and their families preferred some more than others. We also carried out a survey and used the internet to identify what services exist across England and Wales for children/young people with common mental health problems.
To explore these services in more detail, and to hear directly from those using them, we planned to visit nine services across England and Wales so we could interview children/young people, parents and staff there. Unfortunately, Covid-19 stopped us directly visiting the services so we did phone and video interviews instead. We still managed to speak to, and hear the experiences of, more than 100 people (including children/young people and parents).
We combined information from the literature with information from the interviews to create an evidence-based ‘model’ of what services should look like. This model considers some basic things like how quickly children/young people could access a service, what information was available, the importance of confidentiality, whether staff make the service fit with the child/young person’s needs and interests, whether it helps children/young people learn skills to manage their mental health and whether staff at a service work well together. We hope our model will help existing and new services improve what they offer to children/young people and families.REC name
South Central - Berkshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
20/SC/0174
Date of REC Opinion
29 Apr 2020
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion