E-portal for youth mental health

A new e-portal to improve skills and attitudes towards young people’s mental health is being funded by the Department of Health.

The £2.2m e-portal project, which is due to go live in spring 2014, aims to support professionals in improving mental health outcomes for children.

The e-learning hub is being created by a consortium headed by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and will be comprised of a number of training modules targeted at different groups of staff.

Vice president for education at the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, Dr Alistair Thomson, said: “This electronic portal will provide a high quality learning resource to enhance the knowledge, skills and confidence of the multitude of professionals that work directly or indirectly with children and young people with mental health problems.”

The portal will be made up of e-training resources, assessment and outcome evaluation aids tailored to NHS staff and non-health professionals, as well as a package of e-enabled therapies suggesting the best treatment for a child or young person.

“It will help identify children and adolescents with mental health issues at the earliest possible stage thereby not only directly improving children’s health and other associated benefits like improving their educational achievement, but thanks to early intervention, preventing conditions worsening when that child moves into adulthood,” said Dr Thomson.

Members of the consortium behind the portal are; the Royal College of General Practitioners, Royal College of Nursing, Royal College of Psychiatrists, British Psychological Society, National Children’s Bureau and YoungMinds.

The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy will be delivering the e-learning materials that relate to counselling for the programme.