Worrying trend for children and young people's participation
YoungMinds has recently conducted a survey of all local government health scrutiny chairs in England. The results reveal a worrying trend in both awareness of the new Mental Health Strategy and children and young people’s involvement in the new NHS landscape.
Our survey revealed that encouragingly 83.8% of respondents were aware of the Mental Health Strategy. However, three-quarters of the respondents felt that they hadn’t received enough information about the strategy. When the strategy was launched, YoungMinds warned of the challenge of ‘turning the strategy from rhetoric to reality’ and our survey highlights that this particular hurdle is still to be overcome.
The level of children’s and young people’s participation in the new NHS landscape is also a major concern of YoungMinds. Our survey results tell us we are right to be worried. Almost 80% of respondents had not been informed how children and young people can get involved in shaping local health services through Health & Wellbeing Boards and HealthWatch.
As we pointed out when we released the results of the survey, the new NHS landscape is still in its early stages; however, the signs are worrying. We also looked at the Department of Health’s website and found that only 5 out of the 75 of the Healthwatch Pathfinders mention children and young people in a synopsis of their work.
If the structure isn’t right from the start it is going to be much harder to integrate the views of children and young people into the new landscape after it has been formed. The Department of Health has said it isn’t keen to interfere in the formation of Health and Wellbeing Boards and HealthWatch at a local level; however, in this case, surely a strong steer is needed to rectify this worrying trend.
