Children, young adults and families directorate

Our services cover generic whole area child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) through to highly specialist local and national services. 

The majority of our teams are multidisciplinary, with expertise in a range of treatment modalities including psychoanalytic psychotherapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, systemic psychotherapy, as well as a wide range of specialist interventions. 

We are committed to using the best available evidence for our treatments, which includes interventions that are evidenced through national as well as our own research. We routinely measure outcomes to understand the impact of the work we do and as a training organisation, our services may be provided by specialist trainees as well as expert staff. This combination enables our services to remain mindful of cutting edge developments in treatments as well as innovative application of well evidenced treatments. 

We benefit from extensive service user involvement. Our service users have helped us develop services, evaluate them and appoint the best staff into our teams. 

The directorate has five service lines:

• Open Minded (Camden CAMHS)
  
• Complex needs CAMHS
  
• Vulnerable children
  
• Family Nurse Partnership (FNP)
  
• Gloucester House day unit

Open Minded

Open Minded (named by service users) is a Camden wide child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS). It consists of community based CAMHS teams, a refugee service, CAMHS clinicians based in schools and GP practices, as well as integrated into local authority teams and services.

Complex needs CAMHS 

Complex needs CAMHS consists of specialist teams that provide services across a range of areas in north London. Teams in this service line include our specialist multidisciplinary family mental health team, our Lifespan autism and learning disabilities service and our adolescent and young adult service, which provides a specialist psychoanalytic approach to young people up to the age of 25. 

Vulnerable children

Our vulnerable children service line consists of teams and services who work with children who have experienced trauma or who are vulnerable for a range of life event reasons. These include our fostering, adoption and kinship care team, our specialist assessment service for children in care in Haringey (First Step)  and our family drug and alcohol court (FDAC) unites. FDAC is a specialist court service for families where there are significant drug and alcohol difficulties in child protection proceedings. Find out more about the national unit on the FDAC website.

Family Nurse Partnership 

We lead national delivery of the Family Nurse Partnership programme in England. FNP is a voluntary home visiting programme for first time young mums aged 19 or under. A specially trained family nurse visits the young mum regularly at home, from early in pregnancy until the child is two. The FNP national unit is housed within our Trust as part of a consortium, supported by Impetus Private Equity Foundation and Dartington Social Research Unit. It is commissioned by Public Health England and supported by the Department of Health, which hold the licence for the delivery of FNP in England. 

Gloucester House day unit

Gloucester House day unit is a leading independent special school for children with social, emotional and mental health difficulties. Our curriculum is designed for children who have significant barriers to learning due to social, emotional and mental health difficulties as well as special educational needs. All children follow the national curriculum. Our teaching style and the emphasis of the curriculum takes account of the range of special educational needs.