Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will set out a timetable for the inclusion of couples therapists trained to address parental conflict in the specification for multi-disciplinary teams working in child and adolescent mental health services.
We have no plans to do so.
The inclusion of family-focused interventions are for local commissioning and clinical determination. There is no single ‘specification’ for children and young people’s mental health services or child and adolescent mental health services. It is not a single service or pathway and the term refers to the range of services that offer support based on different needs. In response to a National Health Service benchmarking project on children and young people’s mental health services, 99% of providers that responded confirmed that they offer family therapy in joint and group work.