A growing number of children with mental health problems are being treated on adult psychiatric wards as services struggle to cope with a surge in demand following the pandemic, the NHS watchdog has warned.
There were 249 admissions of under-18s to adult psychiatric wards in England in 2021-22, according to data provided by NHS trusts to the Care Quality Commission (CQC), up 30% on the year before.
Of the children admitted to adult wards, 58% of cases were because the child needed to be admitted immediately for their safety.
But in more than a quarter of cases, 27%, the child was admitted to the adult ward because there was no alternative child inpatient or community outreach service available.
The findings come more than 15 years after the government set a target to end inappropriate admissions of children to adult psychiatric wards. The number of admissions gradually reduced but has now risen again, the CQC figures suggest.
Dr Elaine Lockhart, chair of the Child and Adolescent Faculty at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the figures were “a concern but not a surprise. We’ve got a lot of children and young people who have become more unwell. Services are really struggling to meet their needs,” she said.
She added that mental health services across the country were facing a “perfect storm” due to “patchy” provision of intensive treatment services in the community and insufficient funding for early intervention.
“The end state is: we can’t do anything right now that feels safe enough to keep them at home, so we need to admit them. And they are going into beds that are not at all appropriate for them,” she said.
The number of children needing mental health care has risen sharply in the last two years, with those waiting for routine treatment between January and March 2022 increasing by 21% over the last year.
Two-thirds (66%) of the 1,697 under-18s had been waiting longer than the four-week target. Demand for eating disorders has risen particularly sharply.
YoungMinds, a mental health charity for young people, said the figures showed the burden on the system was “unsustainable” and that improvements were needed “not only to inpatient care but also to community services that help prevent young people becoming so ill that they need to be hospitalised”.
Olly Parker, head of external affairs, added that being placed on an adult ward could be traumatic for children who were already extremely unwell and make “a frightening situation even worse. This cannot go on,” he said.
NHS England said that children should only be admitted to adult wards as a “last resort” and that although the CQC figures showed an annual rise, such admissions had dropped in the last quarter despite “record demand”.
It added that it was investing in community mental health services “to ensure children are given the support they need before hospital care is required … including rolling out mental health support teams in 4,700 schools … and recruiting over 4,500 more staff”.
