Children and Young People’s Mental Health Plan

NHS Cheshire and Merseyside is committed to working with stakeholders across our geographical area. We will work in partnership with children, young people, families, and carers to support our infants, children and young people to be the best that they can be and to lead healthy and happy lives.

In December 2021, Cheshire and Merseyside Health and Care Partnership (HCP) developed a Children and Young People’s Mental Health Plan. This replaced the nine separate Local Transformation Plans that different areas of Cheshire and Merseyside previously had in place and combined them to create one co-ordinated strategy. In June 2023, NHS England contacted mental health system transformation leads to communicate national and regional expectations of a 2023-24 annual refresh. This provided the opportunity to rethink and renew our existing plan to ensure that it is closely aligned with the key aims of NHS Cheshire and Merseyside. We know that the most successful and impactful services are produced using the skills, knowledge, and experiences of a wide range of people, particularly those who have experience of using services themselves.

In developing the new, refreshed plan, a period of system-wide engagement took place from January 2024 to March 2024 to inform the plan's priorities and ensure that the voices of our children and young people, parents, carers, professionals, and stakeholders were included throughout.

High-quality and effective plans are as important as ever and NHS Cheshire and Merseyside, now as an established integrated care board (ICB), along with children and young people, partners and other stakeholders, have worked together to refresh our Mental Health Plan for children and young people. Our plan builds on the Cheshire and Merseyside HCP Interim Strategy for 2023-2028 and is aligned with All Together Fairer: Health Equity and the Social Determinants of Health in Cheshire and Merseyside, which highlights the needs of children and young people within its key recommendations.

The mental health and wellbeing of our children and young people is everyone’s business. Our high-level aspirations for children, young people and families are set out in this document. Each of our nine places will assess their progress against the eight priority areas to be addressed and implementation plans will be developed at the appropriate geographic level to reduce unwarranted clinical variation. We will review progress against our plan in the recently established ICB Children’s Committee, our forum for ensuring that we focus on driving improvements in outcomes for our children and young people.