Case study - West London

A 14-year-old child was taken to West Middlesex University Hospital  in December 2020, having allegedly taken an overdose.

The hospital made an emergency telephone referral to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) out of hours for an unplanned review. The child was not previously known to the west London trust until this point.

The CAMHS clinician couldn’t make a full assessment because the child was not cooperative. The child said that they didn’t trust the CAMHS service and said that they hated them. The child was admitted for an overnight stay from the Accident and Emergency Department to a paediatric ward to receive treatment and for the day team to continue to review them the following day.

CP-IS was accessed by the CAMHS nurse, who was alerted that the child was a Looked After Child (LAC) and has been subject to a City of Westminster Council care plan since March 2019. The trust is not located in the Westminster Council area, so without CP-IS there was no way that the trust could have known that the child was on a care plan, unless they had had previous contact with West London CAHMS and information was available on the clinical record system Rio. The CAMHS nurse requested secure information from Westminster council which was used to complete a full CAMHS assessment.

The CAMHS nurse was able to quickly discover that the child was known to the LAC team in Westminster and was in foster care placement. The clinician was already aware that the child had an explosive relationship with their mother and reassured the child that they would not be contacting their mother. At this point, the child began to engage well with the team.