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Youth Clinical Support Team

The Youth Support Clinical Team is a new and developing service within our Trust that has been set up to improve the services available to 16 and 17 year olds from Birmingham who are seeking help for mental health problems.

The team will aim to integrate all young people over 16 into mainstream services for adults of working age from as early in their care as possible, while supporting young people's ongoing development of appropriate skills for adult life as they pass through the broad transitions that accompany this age group.

Referrals will come from other mental health professionals primarily. This can be from within our Trust, from whichever service the young person is currently working with, or from CAMHS teams who wish to engage with our Trust in transferring the care of those approaching or just beyond their 16th birthday into adult mental health services.

The team will also try to provide support for referrers who are facing difficulties in negotiating the complexity of services available from our Trust.

The range of responses available from the team will include:

Advice - answering specific questions. In this response, the team do not get involved in the detail of a case and there is no implication of ongoing case responsibility.
Consultation - entering into clinical discussion. This will incorporate considerable clinical detail, and involves meeting with professionals but not the patient. There is no ongoing case responsibility.
Opinion giving - involves seeing the patient, undertaking an assessment and then giving a clinical opinion to the team responsible for the patient's care. The team decides whether to act on this opinion or not and there is again no ongoing case responsibility.
Shared care I - joint working with a mainstream team where the mainstream team takes the lead. This may involve adding a youth team member to the team looking after the case. The main responsibility for CPA remains with the mainstream team.
Shared care II - joint working with a mainstream team where the youth team takes the lead. This can be in cases where a patient has recently been discharged and is getting to know a new team. The main responsibility for CPA lies with the youth team.
Case responsibility - all responsibility with youth team. Ideally, this would only apply to inpatients, otherwise there would be a need to develop the resources for a wide variety of outpatient and emergency responses provided by the youth team. This would result in isolation from other services and greater financial investment.