NHS: Specialised Services

Earl of Listowel Excerpts

Wednesday 18th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

My Lords, with your Lordships’ consent, I will speak briefly in the gap on the issue of the mental health of families and children and on clinical standards for children and young people in care. My noble friend Lady Hollins raised important points in this area. I will give one further example. The NSPCC’s Young Abusers Project, run for many years by the eminent forensic psychiatrist Dr Eileen Vizard, deals with children who have abused other children. I am afraid there are significant numbers of those children but it is hard to get specialist services for them. In the past, Dr Vizard has explained to me how she has chased her PCT to get the money to provide this specialist service and has failed. The difficulty is that the service starts to treat a child whose behaviour begins to improve and he or she begins to get better. The local authority then whips the child out because the symptoms have gone. But if the service does not intervene effectively in childhood, a child can become an adult with similar problems. We really need to address such issues as regards children’s mental health.

The Cassel Hospital used to provide a service for very damaged families. It enabled mothers who perhaps had lost several children through being taken into care to keep their children because the hospital provided such good, specialist intervention for the mental health of those families. I would be grateful for the Minister’s assurance that the importance of the mental health of families and children specialist services will be carried forward in the new dispensation. Perhaps the Minister could write to me on the clinical standards for young people in care. NICE is responsible for taking those forward. If we can get those right, we will need fewer specialist mental health services for children and families in the future. I look forward to the Minister’s response.