Deaf News: York’s CAMHS mental health service for Deaf children given outstanding rating by CQC

A specialist service for deaf children and young people has been given the highest possible rating of outstanding by the Care Quality Commission following an inspection in July 2016.

From the Leeds and York NHS partnership website:

The Deaf Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) for the north of England is based in York, with other bases in Manchester and Newcastle. It’s one of four centres across England offering a highly specialised mental health service for deaf children and young people.

The team is made up of deaf and hearing staff, reflecting the bi-lingual and bi-cultural nature of the service, enabling it to meet the complex mental health needs of deaf children, young people and families regardless of their language and communication needs and preferences.

Inspectors were impressed by the range of therapies and treatments delivered by the service and praised team members for tailoring their work to meet the specific communication needs of families. They described staff as “passionate and enthusiastic” and noted that the feedback from young people and carers who used the service, and from partners who work with the team, was “universally positive”.

Young people told inspectors that the team understood them and helped them to make sense of their feelings and communicate them to others. They described the staff as “caring and fun” and said they were pleased to have workers from the specialist team.

Parents and carers spoke of staff as being calm at difficult times and commented on the team understanding the whole picture, by meeting them and their child, and by going into schools. They were also confident that they knew what would happen throughout the team’s involvement, and credited them with opening up networks to help families connect to the deaf community in their local area.

Tim Richardson, Service Manager for Deaf CAMHS at Leeds and York Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said:

Read more here: http://www.leedsandyorkpft.nhs.uk/news/latest_news/1/924