Systems Model for Planning Age Appropriate Environments

The Systems Planning Model has been designed to help areas to be ready for the implementation of the duty to provide an ‘Age Appropriate Environment’.

The model is aimed at Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) and Adult Mental Health Services (AMHS) commissioners, providers, planners and analysts. It enables you to devise and test plans to improve your services to meet the needs of under-18s with severe mental health problems.

This tool is designed to help you to consider questions such as:

• What might happen if we introduce emergency beds?
• What might happen if we introduce community based outreach teams?
• What might happen if we increase our core bed base?
• How can we develop and maintain the care pathway to obtain better outcomes for children, young people and their families?

The model simulates the dynamic performance of the system for managing the care and treatment of under-18s with severe mental health problems over a five year period.

You can run the model with the stored data. This data has been researched from actual operational and financial information from regional CAMHS services. This will help you to understand the implications of strategies that you want to test. You are also able to enter your own population, resources, activity and financial data when you want a quantitative estimation of the impact of your plans which is relevant for your area.

Access the Systems Planning Model

Background

The Mental Health Act 2007 includes an amendment to the Mental Health Act 1983 which places a duty on Hospital Managers to ensure that under-18 year olds who require admission due to mental health problems are placed in an environment which is suitable for their age (subject to their need). The aim of the amendment is to eliminate inappropriate admission to adult mental health wards.

This Systems Model provides a means of testing alternative strategies for reducing and eliminating such inappropriate admissions. It is part of the NIMHE 2007 Mental Health Act Implementation Programme, Children and Young People’s workstream.

For details of the NIMHE Mental Health Act 2007 Implementation Programme go to NIMHE website