Real life experience key to improving mental health services for children and young people

In order to improve mental health services for young people, involving those with experience of using them and their families is a must. Tina Emery OBE, an expert by experience at Rethink Mental Illness, discusses the importance of co-production.

Hello! My name is Tina. Whilst I do not have my own experiences with children and young people’s mental health services personally, I do have a wealth of experience, working with those who use services and feed that experience into the work I do with those who provide and commission services. 

My background is that I am a parent carer. This means I have one or more child and young person that has a special educational need and disability. In my case I have two!

Both my children are now young adults, one has moved out of home and bought her own house, whilst the youngest still lives at home, and has started a supported internship for Avon and Somerset Police.

As a parent carer, I stumbled upon my local parent carer forum. They needed some help, so I became involved 10 and half years ago. I became a vice chair, then became involved in regional and national work with the National Parent Carer Forum CIC. 

I have spoken to hundreds, if not thousands of parent carers over the last 10 and half years, some of which have had personal experience of CAMHS and mental health services.

In 2018 I was asked to write a report about parental experiences with CAMHS and inpatient beds. It involved case studies and their first-hand experiences. In 2021, I along with all the parent carer forums in the South West region, co-produced  a booklet to inform families how to steer the systems when your child and or young person is at risk of admission to tier 4 inpatient beds.

I have also worked with the local government association, to coproduce with parent carers a checklist that informs families and social workers about what can happen if your child leaves the family home and resides somewhere else. This can affect the family finances, so families need to know. 

My work with Rethink encompasses this. 

I started with Rethink in August 2024. It was really important to me, that when my tenure with the National Network of Parent Carer Forums ended, that I continued participated in work to improve services and experiences.

One of the best ways to improve outcomes for children and young people and their families, is to use their experiences and actively use them to improve things that need improving and build and expand things that working well.

We are currently working on the service model for the South West Provider Collaborative. I am part of early stages of discussing the service model and how it can improve the experiences of families, including not having to go out of county to receive treatment of eating disorders. Those who have been directly affected by this model are part of the ongoing work and this is really important. 

Every conversation that I am part of, will have the experience of parent carers and their families within it. I will endeavour to coproduce as much as I can and make sure that the users of the services are at the centre of everything, which will definitely improve things for the better.