Children and Young People’s Mental Health Transformation Plan

In December 2021, Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership developed a Children and Young People’s Mental Health Plan. This replaced the nine separate Local Transformation Plans that different areas of Cheshire and Merseyside previously had in place and combined them to create one co-ordinated strategy.

Our current plan sets out numerous outcomes that we want to achieve to improve the mental health and wellbeing of our children and young people. These include:

• Expanding the workforce to increase and enhance mental health service provision and significantly reduce waiting times,
• Working in partnership with a wide range of stakeholders to think innovatively and collaboratively about service delivery,
• Reducing health inequalities of our younger population.

Since the implementation of this plan, our nine Places and Programmes have developed several initiatives to achieve these outcomes. One of these initiatives is a partnership between NHS Cheshire and Merseyside, Barnardo’s, and the UCL Institute of Health Equity to create the Children & Young People’s Health Equity Collaborative. This three-year programme has engaged with over 300 children and young people and aims to generate new approaches to address the obstacles that may prevent children and young people from maintaining good mental and physical health. We are very proud of the work that has been done so far to achieve these outcomes, but we want to, and know that we can, achieve more.

NHS England asks that we review our plan annually, and we have chosen to take this opportunity to rethink and renew our existing plan to ensure that it is closely aligned with the key aims of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside. We know that the most successful and impactful services are produced using the skills, knowledge, and experiences of a wide range of people, particularly those who have experience of using services themselves. This is why we are committed to working collaboratively with our partners to refresh this plan, and to co-producing this alongside our children and young people and their families and carers. We also want to ensure that our new plan is aligned with the work that is occurring across Cheshire and Merseyside to reduce health inequalities and focus our efforts on those who need it most.

Improving Children and Young People’s mental health is a priority within our Health Care Partnership, All Together Fairer Strategy and our Joint Forward Plan. We want to make sure that our new Children’s Mental Health plan enables us to fully achieve these shared goals, with a real focus on prevention and early intervention.

Over the coming months, our efforts will be dedicated to reevaluating our current Children and Young People’s Mental Health Transformation Plan, integrating this with our emerging three-year Children and Young People’s Strategy to produce something that truly aligns with the strategic aims of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside and will result in the best possible outcomes for our population.

You can read a full update about our Children and Young People’s Mental Health Transformation Plan below.