MENTAL health and wellbeing services for children and young people in Plymouth are to get £75,000 to make them more joined up and improve access.

A joint bid by Plymouth City Council and Northern, Eastern and Western Clinical Commissioning Group (NEW Devon CCG) means mental health and emotional wellbeing support services in Plymouth are among eight areas that will get a share of £500,000 nationally.

In total 94 bids were received for the funding and the successful schemes were chosen by a panel of representatives from the Department of Health, the Department of Education, and NHS England.

The pilot in Plymouth will use the cash to make the commissioning of mental health support for children and young people across education, social care and health more joined up to wrap local services around the needs of the child.

This means the commissioners – the Council and NEW Devon CCG – who buy local services - will work more closely with all local providers of children’s services in Plymouth, to make sure mental health and emotional wellbeing support is embedded in local services and better joined up with other services.

The additional funding will assist with current work in Plymouth to build a more co-operative approach to children and young people’s services.

The focus of the programme is to transform services that currently work as single organisations and bring the work into one place.

The new co-operative approach to children and young people services will provide support where it is needed so that children and families can take responsibility for their own health and well-being.

Councillor Sue McDonald, Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Public Health for Plymouth City Council, and Paul O’Sullivan, managing director responsible for commissioning CAMHS for NEW Devon CCG, said: “Both the Council and the CCG are committed to working together to improve children’s services and we know there are definitely improvements that can be made in local child and adolescent mental health services.

“This grant is very welcome in that it will assist us as commissioners to work with existing local services and enable us to bring the whole system together to better meet the needs of the child, making sure they are placed at the centre.

“But we must also recognise that more needs to be done to support young people with mental health issues, both in terms of prevention and at the lower end encouraging better emotional wellbeing in general, as well as those who need more intensive mental health treatment.”

Services in Plymouth provide a range of mental health and emotional wellbeing support for children and young people including around self-harm, drug abuse, and helping schools to manage early signs of mental health problems in pupils.

Funding for the pilots has come from the £40m announced in October by NHS England CEO Simon Stevens and Deputy PM Nick Clegg.

They will now have until April to get their new approaches up and running and will then share learning across the CAMHS sector.

The pilot schemes will cover the whole care pathway for CAMHS care, from universal services provided in locations like schools through to inpatient services.

Dr Martin McShane, NHS England's director for people with long term conditions, said: “Vulnerable children and young people need services they can rely on in a crisis.

“However, we know that by intervening effectively for young people when they begin to show signs of mental health problems we can significantly lower the chances of them needing specialist inpatient care.

“We want to accelerate breaking down barriers in the system and give commissioners, across a range of organisations, the time and space to take a step back and new and more effective ways of working.”