North West London forensic child and adolescent mental health services help children and young people build trust, wellbeing and hope for the future, to be safe and thrive, working with local services.
We support professionals working with young people with forensic risk or challenging behaviour, mental health, emotional or neurodevelopmental needs.
We’re a small, multi-disciplinary health team, with a range of clinical experience and specialist knowledge, supporting professionals working with young people under the age of 18, who’re at risk of being placed in a secure setting. We work to help maintain community and educational placements, aiming for positive outcomes for young people and their families.
We support the development of integrated care plans to help maintain community and educational placements. We work towards positive outcomes for young people and their families, focusing on every young person’s needs.
We aim to:
- Support the professionals working around a child or young person to achieve the best outcome for them based on their specific needs
- Help to identify the challenges and find solutions to support children with complex needs, in terms of education, welfare, safety and health
- Identify gaps in children’s services and promote the development of services that fully meet the needs of young people
- Educate and empower professionals working with young people who have complex needs, to help their understanding of risk, vulnerability and to promote safety for everyone.
- Support the safe transition of young people across services.
- Promote safer lifestyles and behaviour to support young people to have more positive opportunities and achieve their goals.
Our multi-disciplinary team includes:
- Consultant psychiatrist
- Principal clinical psychologist
- Clinical nurse specialist
- Specialist Occupational Therapist
- Team administrator
- Operational manager.
We provide a service across North West London covering 8 boroughs:
- Brent
- Ealing
- Hammersmith and Fulham
- Harrow
- Hillingdon
- Hounslow
- Kensington and Chelsea
- Westminster.
Children and adolescents up to the age of 18 can be referred where there are concerns regarding emotional or mental difficulties, including disorder of conduct and emotions, neurodevelopmental disorder, or serious mental health difficulties.
In addition to:
- Concerns about the risk of harm to others
- Where a young person has become, or is at risk of becoming involved with the youth justice system.
You’ll need to ask for consent from the young person and their carer.
We can accept referrals from all professionals working with children and young people who originate from the boroughs in which we work. We require a local caseholder or care co-ordinator to be involved throughout.
If Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) are already involved, referral should come from CAMHS as the lead health professional.
We can also accept referrals for young people who are ‘looked after’ children from our boroughs but currently live outside of the area.
If you think a young person is a suitable referral into our service, or you want advice from us, you can call or email us.
Telephone: 0208 354 8002
Email: wlm-tr.nwlfcamhs@nhs.net
We try to respond to all phone calls by the end of the working day, or within 24 hours.
A referral form will need to be completed before it can progress to the consultation stage.
Next steps
We’ll contact you within five working days – within 24 hours for urgent cases
A clinician will review your referral and contact you for further discussion about what is requested from the service.
In the first discussion:
If we’re not the right service to support the young person at this time, the clinician may signpost you to other appropriate agencies
If we can help, we can give you advice and offer recommendations for further care. We’ll will send you a note of our discussion.
If a formal consultation is needed:
- You’ll will need to complete a referral form
- The clinician will arrange a time for a consultation, by phone or face to face
- Further consultation appointments may be arranged.
Levels of input offered depend on need and include:
- Level 1: one off brief advice, as described above
- Level 2: one formal consultation with one clinician, over several meetings or as peer support over a therapeutic intervention
- Level 3: attending multi-agency meetings to support the multi-agency network in their thinking about a young person
- Level 4: co-creating a multi-agency formulation and/or risk management plan, risk assessment or notes review
- Level 5: direct (face to face) assessment
- Level 6: working with a local service to offer joint intervention or support to a young person or carers.
Decisions about the level of input offered will depend on the triage process of our multi-disciplinary discussion to consider what we can usefully offer.
If there are a number of agencies working with a young person, it may be appropriate to arrange a multi-agency consultation.
In some cases, we’ll will be directly involved with the young person. This usually means undertaking a specialist approach to intervention. This will be determined as part of the initial consultation process.
We can’t:
- Be a Care Programme Approach care coordinator
- Be a caseholder
- Complete court reports for young people who don’t live in the boroughs we cover.