About our visits
Vists to people with a mental illness, learning disability or other mental disorder are one of the key ways in which we can check their care and treatment against best legal, ethical and clinical practice. Seeing where a person lives, where he or she receives care and treatment, and hearing how he or she feels about that care and treatment, gives us an important insight into how law and policy impact on individual experience. We visit people in a range of settings throughout Scotland; at home, in hospital, or in any other setting where care and treatment is being delivered.
Since 2005 we have been monitoring what happens to children or young people under 18 if they are admitted to non-specialist settings such as adult mental health, or general paediatric wards. We made this a priority because of the duty placed on NHS Boards to provide age appropriate services and accommodation and because young people with a mental illness are particularly vulnerable to having their rights and welfare overlooked.
We expect to be told about non-specialist admissions of young people.We ask the doctor responsible for the treatment of any child or young person admitted to such settings to provide us with more detailed information about how care and treatment is being provided. We also visit all specialist children and adolescent in-patient facilities in Scotland on an annual basis, as part of our normal visiting programme.
Through our visits to specialist in-patient units and by monitoring admissions to non-specialist wards (and often by visiting young people in non-specialist wards) we have gathered a lot of detailed information about the care and treatment young people receive as in-patients. We feel that we have a reasonably accurate picture of how NHS Boards are making progress to fulfil the duty to provide age appropriate accommodation when young people are admitted to hospital and we report on this each year in our annual monitoring report.
Our contact with children and young people until now has tended to be with the very small number of young people who have been hospital in-patients. We have had limited contact with children and young people who are receive mental health care and treatment in the community. We decided to find out more about how CAMH services are being provided across the country through a programme of visits to CAMH services across Scotland. Our aim was to provide a picture of how these services are developing to meet national policy priorities and perhaps more crucially, the needs of individual children and young people.
As part of this themed visit programme we also visited all the specialist in-patient facilities. We arranged to meet as many of the young people admitted to non-specialist wards over a three month period as possible. Where it was not possible to speak to the young person directly, we reviewed medical and nursing notes relating to the admission. Finally we arranged meetings with representatives from CAMH services and local authorities in each of the 11NHS Board areas in mainland Scotland. We interviewed 16 young people in different units across Scotland, reviewed the case files of 13 more, and interviewed staff in 11 units during our visits.
