What the Parenting and Child Team offers

We provide a range of services to support the needs of children and young people with complex presentations.

This includes:

• Consultation and Liaison to professionals and professional systems
• Teaching and training
• Comprehensive multi-disciplinary assessments leading to recommendations regarding the therapeutic and care needs of children and young people. These may include specialist neurodevelopmental assessments and assessments of attachment.
• A range of evidence-based treatments including CBT, family therapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, narrative based interventions, psychopharmacology and EMDR. We will support the provision of interventions locally but where this is not available we have a limited capacity to provide treatment ourselves.
• Time limited trial for change interventions, in collaboration with social services, where there is a concern that parent child interactions may be harmful.

Assessment 

During the assessment process we meet with family members individually and in combination over a number of weeks. Each appointment usually lasts for between 1 and 2 hours.

Once we have completed our assessment, we will provide a report and discuss our findings and recommendations with the family and or the referrer.

We are able to give an opinion on child protection issues and on pre-care proceedings assessments within the Public Law Outline (PLO) and sometimes in Private Law cases where there are concerns about the welfare of the child.

We can assist in the formulation of the therapeutic and care needs of children and young people with complex presentations and or provide advice on placement and contact issues.

The service is expanding its 'trial for change' extended assessment and intervention programme aimed at assessing and facilitating parents' capacity to make changes.

We work with medical teams both within and outside the hospital where FII is suspected, offering advice on recognition, management and intervention.