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Health policies in England highlight the need for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) to embed new knowledge in practice, yet evidence remains scarce about the services’ ability to learn from the external environment. This paper aims to present a critical analysis of the CAMHS’ ability to implement new knowledge through the lens of absorptive capacity, an organisation’s ability to identify, assimilate and use new valuable knowledge.

Sixteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with staff from the CAMHS department of a mental health organisation in England to explore the services’ absorptive capacity.

Professionals were identified having an impact on the main absorptive capacity components in the following ways: professional background and perceived reliability of knowledge sources appeared to affect knowledge identification; informal communication was found to facilitate knowledge assimilation and exploitation; trust was found to enable knowledge exploitation, particularly between senior management and frontline professionals. At an organisational level, team meetings and internal reporting were identified as enablers to knowledge assimilation and exploitation, while organisational hierarchy and patient data management systems were identified as barriers to knowledge assimilation. No organisational processes were found regarding knowledge identification, indicating an imbalanced investment in the main components of absorptive capacity.

Investing in these underpinning factors of absorptive capacity can assist CAMHS with capitalising on new knowledge that is valuable to service provision.

This study offers novel insights into the learning ability of CAMHS through the lens of absorptive capacity.

The National Workforce Programme (DoH, 2004a), supported by the National Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Workforce sub‐group, commissioned a project to look at New Ways of Working (NWW) in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS). This article provides an overview of the NWW CAMHS project using two of the 10 early implementer sites as examples. General lessons from the project are explored.

Data shows that there is an increasing number of young people in the UK needing access to mental health services, including crisis teams. This need has been exacerbated by the current global pandemic. There is mixed evidence for the effectiveness of crisis teams in improving adult functioning, and none, to the authors’ knowledge, that empirically examines the functioning of young people following intervention from child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) crisis teams in the UK. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to use CAMHS Crisis Team data, from an NHS trust that supports 1.4 million people in the North East of England, to examine a young person's functioning following a crisis.

This service evaluation compared functioning, as measured by the Outcome Rating Scale (ORS), pre- and post-treatment for young people accessing the CAMHS Crisis Team between December 2018 and December 2019.

There were 109 participants included in the analysis. ORS scores were significantly higher at the end of treatment (t(108) = −4.2046, p < 0.001) with a small effect size (d = −0.36). Sixteen (15%) patients exhibited significant and reliable change (i.e. functioning improved). A further four (4%) patients exhibited no change (i.e. functioning did not deteriorate despite being in crisis). No patients significantly deteriorated in functioning after accessing the crisis service.

Despite a possibly overly conservative analysis, 15% of patients not only significantly improved functioning but were able to return to a “healthy” level of functioning after a mental health crisis following intervention from a CAMHS Crisis Team. Intervention(s) from a CAMHS Crisis Team are also stabilising as some young people’s functioning did not deteriorate following a mental health crisis. However, improvements also need to be made to increase the number of patients whose functioning did not significantly improve following intervention from a CAMHS Crisis Team.

This paper evaluates a young person’s functioning following a mental health crisis and intervention from a CAMHS Crisis Team in the North East of England.

This paper provides an overview of the national child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) mapping exercise, the workforce data reported in the mapping between 2003 and 2006, and how this data relates to current policy. The paper will first outline key issues within current CAMHS workforce policy and provide an introduction to the mapping process itself in order to establish the context in which the findings from the mapping exercises are being presented. The mapping is carried out by Durham University on behalf of the Department of Health. Core trend data is provided on the growth and development of the specialist CAMHS.

This article will provide an overview of the national child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) workforce planning programme 2006‐7, which used early implementer sites in each of the eight English regions to produce a specialist CAMHS workforce plan and explores the potential transferable learning from the CAMHS experience to workforce planning across a range of other settings.

Targets set in 2005 by the Department of Health in the form of a public service agreement (PSA, 2003‐2006) standard require the development of comprehensive CAMHS, which provide services for children and young people with learning disabilities (LD). This standard presents particular challenges to the existing national CAMHS workforce.This paper reports on a specific project to undertake a northwest regional audit regarding capacity and capability of staff working in CAMHS to care for children and young people with learning disabilities.

Specialist CAMHS provide skilled assessment and interventions for children, young people and their families who have mental health disorders. The training needs of the staff who work in specialist CAMHS are not always clear or prioritised, due to the complexities and differing contexts in which specialist CAMHS are provided. The aim of this paper was to establish stakeholders' experiences of service complexities and challenges that affect training within specialist CAMHS. The project employed interviews to gain wide‐ranging consultation with key stakeholder groups. The sample consisted of 45 participants recruited from policy departments, professional bodies, higher education providers, commissioners, service managers, and practitioners. The participants identified a number of themes that limit training, and put forward solutions on how these could be facilitated in the future. Emerging themes related to leadership and the role of service managers, strategic management of training, commissioning, levels of staff training, resources, impact of training on service users, and availability of training programmes. The findings emphasise the need for the strategic workforce planning of training to meet service delivery goals. Policy, commissioning, workforce training strategies, service needs, and delivery of training should be integrated and closely linked.

This paper focuses on the policy context that led to the development of the New Ways of Working in child and adolescent mental health services (NWW CAMHS) project and the future direction of change that is its legacy. NWW CAMHS represents a merging of policy and practice across what is sometimes a divide between adult and child services. In some aspects, CAMHS had already adopted what became known as a NWW in adult mental health with multidisciplinary teams characterised by dispersed patterns of responsibility and leadership. In other areas, particularly the involvement of service users and carers, CAMHS has been less forward‐thinking. There continues to be a significant workforce challenge for children's services and a risk that innovation and development will not be fully inclusive of the full range of service users' needs. It is important that the lessons learned from the national workforce programme are kept while the usual boundaries to development across services are broken down.

The purpose of this paper is to compare NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC) Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) activity data over a one-year period to the Choice and Partnership Approach (CAPA) demand and capacity model assumptions, providing an evaluation of CAPA model implementation and its effects on actual demand and capacity of the service.

Three assumptions within the CAPA model are tested against activity data extracted from the patient management system. Analysis by patient record assesses the number of appointments the patients received and the patients’ journey from assessment to treatment. A combination of community CAMHS data are combined to compare actual activity against assumed capacity required to meet demand according to the CAPA model.

Tested against an audit of 2,896 patient records, CAMHS average 7.76 core appointments per patient compared to the CAPA assumption of 7.5 appointments at a 0 per cent DNA rate. The second CAPA assumption states that 66 per cent of assessments will result in treatment, compared to 73.55 per cent in NHSGGC CAMHS. Finally, the workforce model in CAMHS has clinical capacity to meet demand according to the CAPA assumption of weekly accepted referral rates not exceeding the number of clinical whole time equivalent.

The data allow for identification of inefficiencies within CAMHS and highlights how capacity can be increased, without increasing budgets, to meet a rising clinical demand. The results allow managers and clinicians to improve job planning to ensure more children and young people have quick access to services.