One singular fact emerges from the 85-page report on the Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) in North Kerry, and it is that vulnerable children have been let down by this most sensitive part of the health system.<\/p>\n
Both they and their families have suffered, and this is clearly recognised by the HSE apologies and compensation scheme.<\/p>\n
The CAMHS service has been in the spotlight for many years following a series of reports, now added to by this final independent report by consultant child & adolescent psychiatrist Dr Colette Halpin, into the North Kerry CAMHS system.<\/p>\n
The report was commissioned in 2023 after a random audit of 50 files found what the HSE described as potential concerns in the care of 16 children.<\/p>\n
This review looked at 374 cases.<\/p>\n
Among the key findings are:<\/p>\n
– Potential harm in 209 cases<\/p>\n
– 195 cases deemed moderate risk<\/p>\n
– 2 cases deemed major risk<\/p>\n
– 12 cases deemed minor risk<\/p>\n
High prescribing of antipsychotic medicines is highlighted and almost all the children with autism were given these drugs.<\/p>\n
There was also limited availability of talking therapies.<\/p>\n
A national review by the Mental Health Commission in July 2023 was particularly damning.<\/p>\n
It also noted that the North Kerry service operated in an area of high deprivation, which put extra pressure on a service already under strain.<\/p>\n
One of the key recommendations from the MHC was that CAMHS would be regulated to ensure standards under the Mental Health Act.<\/p>\n
This has still to occur but will happen when the Mental Health Bill 2024 finally becomes law. That will be a very important development.<\/p>\n
Read More:<\/p>\n
Potential risk in 209 cases in North Kerry CAMHS review<\/a><\/p>\n CAMHS patient families ‘heartbroken and angry’ at report<\/a><\/p>\n ‘It destroyed her’ – mother of North Kerry CAMHS patient<\/a><\/p>\n Today’s report has found that the resources in the CAMHS service in North Kerry were significantly below what is recommended in the national mental health policies, A Vision for Change 2006 and Sharing the Vision 2020.<\/p>\n Families where there were deficiencies in care received apologies some time ago.<\/p>\n There has been a long delay in the publication of today’s report which has added to frustration and anger among families.<\/p>\n The delay was reportedly due to the scale of what was uncovered, the complexity of the issues plus the need for due diligence and fair procedures.<\/p>\n The full report has been shared with families in North Kerry today by registered post, and the Cabinet is being briefed later.<\/p>\n After the problems emerged in the South Kerry CAMHS service, we had the 2022 Maskey Report, and a non-adversarial compensation scheme was later set up and run by the State Claims Agency, which has paid out millions of euro to date.<\/p>\n It is expected this compensation scheme will now be expanded to the North Kerry CAMHS families in cases where failings have been found.<\/p>\n Previously, the Irish Hospital Consultants Association has also pointed to vacant consultant psychiatrist posts as a problem in delivering a full CAMHS service.<\/p>\n We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One singular fact emerges from the 85-page report on the Child & Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[103,61,60,410,411],"class_list":["post-310793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}