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Tailored CAMHS Educational Sessions for Primary Care Staff

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2024

Anna Sherratt*
Affiliation:
Midlands Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, Telford, United Kingdom
Michael Foster
Affiliation:
North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom
*
*Presenting author.
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Abstract

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Aims

To develop and evaluate a tailored teaching session for local non-medical primary care staff on common CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health) conditions. It was hypothesised that quizzes administered before and after the educational session would evidence an improvement in clinician's knowledge of these clinical presentations.

Methods

Invitations were extended to all local PCNs to attend educational sessions held on four separate occasions in December 2022 and January 2023. Multiple choice quizzes were administered before and after a presentation on four common CAMHS conditions. The presentation and quizzes covered the presentation, diagnosis, and management of autism, eating disorders, depression and emotional dysregulation. Quizzes were scored out of a maximum 16 points with four questions per clinical condition. A paired T-test (following tests for normal variance) was performed using JASP software to compare the before and after scores.

Results

A total of 22 non-medical clinical staff attended the sessions. This included physician associates (n = 1), allied health professionals (n = 5), practice nurse (n = 3), care coordinator (n = 3), health care assistant (n = 4), social prescriber (n = 1), mental health practitioner (n = 3), advanced clinical practitioner (n = 1) and advanced nurse practitioner (n = 1). For the 22 pairs of quizzes, mean differences and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated between before-and-after scores. The mean difference between total score was 6.9 CI [6.1, 7.7] which was statistically significant (p < 0.001).

Conclusion

More than 31,000 additional staff have been recruited into healthcare roles at general practices across the country since 2019 to meet soaring demand for primary care services. Since the pandemic record numbers of children and adolescents are presenting with mental health difficulties, therefore, it is likely that primary care clinicians will encounter these presentations in their practice. Our results suggest that such a tailored approach can offer effective means in improving knowledge in this growing group of professionals. Such sessions may also provide informal spaces in which to network with secondary mental health professionals, improving links between services.

Type
2 Education and Training
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal College of Psychiatrists

Footnotes

Abstracts were reviewed by the RCPsych Academic Faculty rather than by the standard BJPsych Open peer review process and should not be quoted as peer-reviewed by BJPsych Open in any subsequent publication.

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