Mental Health Services: Children and Young People
(asked on 9th November 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to issue guidance on parental visits to child and adolescent mental health facilities during the November 2020 covid-19 lockdown.
We recognise just how important it is that parents are able to visit their children in children and young people’s mental health inpatient settings in a very careful and COVID-19-secure way. The National Health Service has taken precautions to ensure that patients and staff in inpatient settings are suitably protected from the outbreak and to reduce the risk of decreased capacity due to staff needing to self-isolate.
Recent guidance on ‘Visiting healthcare inpatient settings during the COVID-19 pandemic: principles’, updated on 13 October 2020, focuses on both ensuring infection control and making sure that patients can access the therapeutic support and visits they need during the pandemic across healthcare inpatient settings, including for children and young people’s mental health facilities. This also includes specific guidance on appropriate application of the legal frameworks around isolation and testing during the pandemic.
The guidance is available at the following link: