Our response
RCPCH Wales welcomes the opportunity to provide comments on the strategy. While it does provide useful actions for improving child mental health, the preference of RCPCH Wales would be to have a specific children and young people mental health and wellbeing strategy.
The case for early support, intervention and prevention in childhood has been well made. With an increase in the number of children and young people requiring mental health and wellbeing support, RCPCH Wales strongly believes the Welsh Government should afford children and young people’s mental health more attention.
Our recommendations
The Welsh Government should:
- Develop a delivery plan for actions relating to children and young people to ensure children are not lost in the all-age strategy.
- Provide greater emphasis on the early years, specifically the first 1,000 days, supporting parents to establish a healthy parental-infant relationship and school readiness within Vision Statement 1.
- Ensure more of an emphasis on protecting children’s good mental health within Vision Statement 2 and how the Welsh Government will mitigate child mental health inequalities.
- Create a separate action in Vision Statement 3 for improving transition between child and adult mental health services.
- Detail what is considered the ‘appropriate level of support’ within Vision Statement 3.
- Clarify if children and young people are included in the actions relating to physical health (VS4.6-VS4.8) in Vision Statement 4.
There are clear actions within the draft strategy that RCPCH welcomes, including the emphasis on cross-governmental action and the need for seamless mental health services across primary, community and secondary care. However, there are concerns that some actions within the strategy lack the necessary detail needed to ensure the strategy has a powerful and long-lasting impact.
This page provides a summary, and you can download our full response below.