Developing safe care in mental health for children and young people: drawing on UK experience for solutions to an under-recognised problem (October 2015)

Summary

Internationally, safety of care in child and adolescent mental health has received limited attention. Attempts to understand this area have mainly focused on issues of safety in relation to safeguarding on the one hand, or lack of access to services on the other. There is a call for clinicians, service developers and researchers to consider harm and safety more generally in child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS).

America and other countries have begun to initiate discussions on the possibility of harm caused by psychotherapy, however, the lack of shared definitions as to what constitutes safety and harm present ongoing challenges. To start to rise to these challenges this paper, published in Current Treatment Options in Pediatrics, outlines a possible framework for considering harm in relation to child and adolescent mental health provision.