You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Editorial
Long time coming for children and young people in the long-term plan
  1. Robin Barker
  1. We Can Talk, Child Outcomes Research Consortium, The Kantor Centre of Excellence, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Robin Barker, We Can Talk, Child Outcomes Research Consortium, The Kantor Centre of Excellence, 4-8 Rodney Street, London, N1 9JH, UK; robin{at}healthyteenminds.com

https://doi.org/10.1136/ebnurs-2019-103223

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Buried on page 50 of the NHS Long Term Plan, at the end of a paragraph where other totally generic statements are ‘bolded’, is a sentence I want to see written on banners, spray painted across the front of Whitehall and on the front page of every politician’s ‘vote for me’ handouts between now and 2030. ‘Over the coming decade the goal [of the NHS] is to ensure that 100% of children and young people who need specialist [mental health] care can access it’ (https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/nhs-long-term-plan-version-1.2.pdf).

    If this is surprising to readers, that our country currently is not even trying to meet the health needs of children with mental health conditions, it should not be. Until the publication of the NHS Long Term Plan, the stated goal was to increase funding and staffing to services to meet the needs of one in three children and young people in need of specialist mental health support by 2021 (https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Mental-Health-Taskforce-FYFV-final.pdf). Not one in three children and young people, …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Patient consent for publication Not required.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.