The standards for integrated care pathways for CAMH services have three main elements.

Process standards

The process standards are aimed at supporting NHS boards and partner agencies to lay essential foundations on which to develop their ICPs. The standards are also designed to ensure the involvement of all stakeholders including children, young people and their parents/carers. They outline the infrastructure which must be in place in order to develop, implement and use ICPs successfully: the key tasks to be undertaken, and who is responsible.

Generic care standards

The generic care standards describe the interactions and interventions that must be offered to all children and young people who access CAMH services and their parents/carers. Children and young people referred to specialist CAMH services may already have been included in local staged intervention processes. It is important to take full account of these when delivering care through an ICP.

CAMH services might provide consultation to the wider workforce around the child in relation to children and young people with additional support needs. Consultation could involve giving advice and support/training to the workforce around the child and/or supporting further planning and interventions. A generic ICP is suggested as the main framework for child and adolescent mental health care. Condition-specific elements can be added for children and young people with a specific diagnosis.

Service providers should ensure that children, young people and their parents/carers are fully engaged with CAMH services. It is recognised that ‘services should be offered as near to home as possible and in a number of settings to take account of the different needs and choices of children, young people and their parents/carers and the required intervention. This could include locations such as schools, homes and family centres, which may be perceived as less stigmatising, as well as traditional clinical settings’. For children and young people, it is important that the ‘services provided should be appropriate for their age, gender, sexual orientation, physical and developmental ability and cultural background’.

NHS boards and partner agencies should develop a local plan to ensure that children and young people, already receiving care from specialist CAMH services, will have their care delivered through an ICP in the future.

Service improvement standards

ICPs should significantly contribute to continuous quality improvement, and will help NHS boards and partner agencies to consistently deliver care that is ‘person-centred, clinically effective and safe, for every person, all the time’.

The service improvement standards are designed to help ensure that ICPs are being implemented and actively used for variance analysis, service redesign, training analysis and, ultimately, demonstrating a positive impact on care. It is acknowledged that not all variance is bad, for example in the context of clinical judgement in the assessment and treatment process.