ABSTRACT

This chapter outlines some of the key issues facing Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) development in England and describes some of the organisational issues which beset the commissioner, manager and clinician in their attempts to work towards and within a comprehensive CAMHS. There are multiple indicators for what so-called comprehensive CAMHS should include and cover, with ‘proxy’ measures which will mark the CAMHS impact on the wider system for children and young people, but it has been left to local contexts to decide on how best this should be configured. CAMHS is a shared responsibility, and the CAMHS professional’s job involves both discharging his or her clinical specialism directly with patients, and acting as a resource inside the system to help others to address mental health needs in the way they go about their jobs. Thus CAMHS becomes twin track – a specialist service and a connected part of universal services for children.