Carrie Ladd is a part time NHS GP, a spare time RCGP Clinical Fellow in Perinatal Mental Health and a full time mum… doing overtime! You can find her on Twitter @LaddCar and she has a website.
On Sunday 28th November, Dr Lucy Pocock and I co-hosted a session of the Twitter based journal club #gpjc to discuss one of the emerging priority areas of General Practice – Child and Young People’s Mental Health. The BJGP paper we discussed was a systematic review of primary care practitioner’s perceptions to barriers in managing these problems. All contributors seemed to agree that GPs are seeing more and more cases of mental health problems in adolescents but there was some debate as to whether this piece taught us anything new about the challenges we face in supporting these young people.
The themes identified in this review as ‘barriers’ were familiar to those joining the discussion and they are in common with most other mental health sub-specialities. Fear of judgement or stigma may limit disclosure, concerns over confidentiality may limit discussion and lack of referral options locally may restrict what help is available. This review also highlighted a lack of confidence in GPs themselves recognising childhood mental health problems and this may prove a springboard piece of work to address this unmet need in the near future.
This was a large systematic review covering 4151 articles in initial stages with 43 being looked at in detail – 30 quantitative and 13 qualitative. The articles were from a range of countries and one of the points in our discussion questioned whether this undermined or strengthened the validity of the results. Although Australia and Ireland could be seen to have similar health systems/ socioeconomic factors to the UK, perhaps South Africa and Puerto Rico less so? Also many of these studies were not specifically GPs but paediatrics as well which is important to be aware of.
In the final section of the discussion, we looked at how we can mitigate these barriers and collaboration seemed a key theme. Several people suggested better lines of communication with our mental health colleagues. Quarterly MDTs between psychiatry/CMHT & the GP practice, Psychiatry colleagues spending a day a week in General Practice is being done in one innovative GP surgery. In another great example of collaborative working, a specialist eating disorder therapist is based in a predominantly University Population Bristol based GP practice.
Finally, close of discussion included signposting to the RCGP Mental Health Toolkit which is available free, open access to all and mention of Young Minds and MindEd resources which are well worth a look up if new to you. The conversation continued after the scheduled hour and the 10 minute consultation model was cast aside as not fit for purpose when a patient comes to talk about mental health problems with longer appointments welcomed by the #gpjc group.
It is clear that from the GPs who joined the discussions on Sunday, this is an area of general practice we could do better, and we need to galvanise interest and support for a society wide movement to raise awareness and prompt further investment in Child and Young People’s Mental Health services.
If you haven’t popped over on a Sunday evening, check out @GPjournalclub for their monthly discussion group – see you there.
