Mental Health - Children and Young People's Services
Children and young people’s mental health services (CYPMHS) support under-18s with psychosis, eating disorders and personality disorders and neuro-disabilities such as autism and/or learning disabilities.
In 2019/20, almost 560,000 under-18s received at least one contact from NHS-funded mental health care services in England, and demand for CYPMHS is rising; one in six children aged five to 16 is now identified as having a probable mental disorder, a rise from one in nine in 2017.
GIRFT’s national report offers 21 recommendations to improve pathways and clinical practice, improve overall patient experience, and reduce unwarranted variation. Among them are measures to create better access to intensive community support teams, to ensure acute hospitals are part of the crisis pathway and to reduce the length of time patients spend in a general adolescent unit (GAU).
From November 2025, NHS England brought together its improvement teams under the GIRFT brand, delivering a more unified, clinically led and data-driven approach to service improvement. The team formerly known as the Mental Health Improvement Support Team (MHIST) is now part of the expanded GIRFT programme – together, we are working to build on existing strengths and ensure improvement recommendations are embedded within regional performance oversight to maximise impact.
Click the link in the Resources box, right, to visit the community of practice of the former MHIST team on FutureNHS, where you will find resources for improving quality, experience and productivity in mental health service.
- Mental Health - Children and Young People's Services Clinical Lead
Dr Johnny Downs
Mental health – children and young people’s services clinical lead
Johnny is an honorary consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist in community CAMHS at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.
He is also a senior clinical lecturer and National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) clinician scientist at the department of child and adolescent psychiatry, King’s College London (KCL), where he leads the CAMHS Digital Lab: an interdisciplinary team formed as a collaboration between Maudsley BRC Centre for Translational informatics, KCL and Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The lab combines digital therapies, informatics and epidemiology approaches to enhance mental health care for children and young people.
He is a co-investigator on the NIHR Child and Families Policy Research Unit.
- Former Mental Health Clinical Lead for Children & Young People’s Neurodevelopmental Services
Dr Holan Liang
Former mental health – children and young people’s neurodevelopmental services clinical lead
Holan is a senior clinical research associate at the Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University, and a consultant paediatric neuropsychiatrist with honorary consultant contract at North East London Foundation NHS Trust (NELFT) and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
She is a former psychiatry lead of the national specialist tic service at Great Ormond Street Hospital and has over 15 years’ experience in specialist child and adolescent psychiatry neurodevelopmental services. Her special interest is in neurodevelopmental disorders: ADHD, autism, Tourette syndrome, OCD and intellectual disability.
She has been honorary associate professor at the University College of London Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and a clinical research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience.
She is involved in clinical research, including NIHR funded clinical drug trials (SATURN Study) and international genetics studies (TicGENETICS). She was an elected member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Faculty Executive Committee 2019-2023, where she was workforce lead.
She has taught undergraduate and postgraduates in neurodevelopmental disorders for over 15 years at King’s College London and University College London and peer reviews proposals and papers for NIHR and the BMJ. She has also written for the Guardian, the Telegraph and RED magazine and has written two commercial books on mental health: Inside Out Parenting and A Sense of Belonging.
- Former Mental Health Children and Young People's Services Clinical Lead
Dr Guy Northover
Former mental health – children and young people’s services clinical lead and GIRFT national report author
Dr Guy Northover is currently a consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist who has been working in Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust for the past eight years. He has interests in children and young people’s mental health urgent care services, clinical governance, health informatics and quality improvement. He holds a post graduate certificate and diploma in systemic therapy.
He has extensive clinical experience of Community and Inpatient Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and has recently taken up the Early Intervention In Psychosis role working out of the Tier 4 inpatient unit. He has experience of service redesign through the development of CAMHS clinical pathways, the new Tier 4 inpatient service and rapid response team, as well as the CAMHS eating disorder service.
Dr Northover is the regional representative for the faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and undertakes the role of Quality Improvement Lead, attending the Royal College of Psychiatry Quality Improvement Committee. He is also an expert advisor for NICE Centre for Guidelines.
Useful information
Support for children and young people with mental health needs, learning disabilities and/or who are autistic: A resource pack to support the development of local services: NHS England’s Quality Improvement Taskforce has launched a resource pack that aims to improve understanding of the current care and treatment offer for children and young people with mental health needs, learning disabilities and/or who are autistic, with a specific focus on pathways of care into hospital beds, as well as the experience of inpatient care. The resource pack aligns with other programmes of work, including the document Strategic Framework: Children and Young People’s Mental Health (CYPMH) Inpatient Workforce Development.
Access resource pack via GIRFT’s FutureNHS workspace
Visit Children & Young People Quality Improvement Taskforce FutureNHS workspace
National framework and operational guidance for autism assessment services: NHSE has shared guidance intended to help integrated care boards deliver improved outcomes in all-age autism assessment pathways. This includes a national framework with ten principles for autism assessment services and guidance about applying these principles throughout the commissioning cycle. It also includes operational guidance, intended to guide strategic decision making about the range of autism assessment service that should be provided in each area.
- Summary of National Report Findings
GIRFT national report aims to improve access to care for children and young people with mental health disorders
Ensuring more children and young people receive the right mental health care, in the right place for them, is among the key aims of the new national report from the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) team.
Improving the mental health of children and young people is a priority in the Long Term Plan (LTP), with GIRFT’s recommendations aligning and working closely with the Quality Improvement Taskforce, which was established in 2019 to improve specialist CYP inpatient mental health, autism and/or learning disability services in England.
The report’s recommendations for freeing up inpatient capacity for those who most need it, through continued investment in community services.
Find out more about GIRFT’s data-led approach and best practice resources:
- Mental Health – Children and Young People’s Services National Report
In April 2022, GIRFT published its national speciality report for Mental Health – Children and Young People’s Services:
Click image to view the pdf report
Watch the video about the Mental Health Children and Young People’s Services report…
Click above to play the Mental Health Children and Young People’s Services national report video
- Mental Health – Children and Young People’s Services News