Welcome To CAMHS

Service description

What Does Our Service Do?

The Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) is a specialist service offering mental health assessment and intervention to children and young people (up to the age of 18 years) who need more help with their mental health. Many young people experience difficulties from time to time and can access support through friends and family or services such as their GP, school nurse, school counselors, on-line counselling, early intervention services (such as Relate) or Mental Health Support Teams around them.

Specialist CAMHS is therefore one of several services offering mental health support and intervention for children and young people. CAMHS will work with children and young people with significant mental health difficulties with a moderate to severe impact on functioning which requires specialist mental health support.

CAMHS works with young people and their families from the country and beyond. The service also links with other children’s services, such as early help, schools and social care to provide a multi-agency approach and to achieve the following:

1. Assessment and diagnosis of mental health conditions and neurodevelopmental difficulties.
2. Collaborative, recovery-based approach to care by supporting young people and their families to identify realistic goals or changes that they would like to make building upon existing strengths
3. Empowering young people to identify, express and communicate their needs, take developmentally appropriate responsibility for their health and wellbeing and feel confident in knowing where and how to get additional support if necessary
4. Using evidence-based approaches to treat or support young people and their families to better manage their difficulties. This can include approaches such as cognitive behaviour therapy, systemic family therapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, dialectical behaviour therapy amongst other therapies, and/or pharmacological intervention

About our services

CAMHS is made up of a number of specialist outpatient teams, who work with children, young people and their families in FNPH Oshodi Annex. The teams are multi-disciplinary, made up of staff from a variety of different professional backgrounds, who are specialists in mental health, including nurses, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, occupational therapists, speech and language therapists, social workers and psychotherapists. The service also includes peer mentors and those with lived experience of mental health services. Each team is supported by a dedicated admin team.

The Primary Mental Health team is the link between specialist CAMHS and other Children and Young People’s services across Lagos and Nigeria as whole, who support children and young people’s mental health and emotional well-being, for example teachers, GPs, school nurses, social workers and youth workers. The team also offers time-limited early intervention to young people who are experiencing mild-moderate mental health difficulties and who may be at risk of developing a more significant mental health disorder. The team includes Child Wellbeing Practitioners (CWPs), who offer low intensity intervention to young people between the ages of 6-18 years with mild mental health difficulties. This can be up to eight individual sessions using a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) approach.

The Eating Disorders team is a specialist service, works with groups of young people (aged between 0-18 years) who have an eating disorder, and their families. The most common eating disorders are Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia and Binge Eating Disorder (which is also known as BED). The role of the team is to support young people to help them to recover from their eating disorder using evidenced based intervention. Treatment typically lasts between 12-18 months.

The Young People’s team is a specialist team who work with young people who are deemed to be at high risk of mental health difficulties due to social circumstances and /or adverse childhood experiences. The team works with Looked After Children, young people who are adopted, unaccompanied young asylum seekers, young people known to Youth Offending Services and young people experiencing homelessness. They work in partnership with the corresponding social care systems and provide advice, consultation, liaison and training to other professionals, carers and parents involved in the care of these groups of children. In addition, specialist mental health assessment and intervention is provided to those children and young people presenting with mental health difficulties. The team accepts direct referrals from the local authority and health care professionals working with these groups of young people.

The Learning Disability team, based at in Oshodi, provides services for children and young people with a moderate to profound learning disability presenting with mental health and or associated challenging behaviours. These include physical aggression towards others or property, self-injury, smearing or other risky behaviours. The LD team, work with the child and their families to support them to manage and change behaviours of concern, using positive behaviour support; a person-centred framework underpinned by the values of. inclusion, choice, participation, and equality of opportunity. Positive behaviour support helps with developing an understanding of the reason and function of challenging behaviour so we can better meet people’s needs, enhance quality of life and reduce the likelihood that the behaviour will happen.  To be referred to the Paediatric Psychology Service, young people will need to be under the care of and referred by a medical Consultant Paediatrician who works at one of the FNPH Yaba or in the community.

The Generic Outpatient team is the largest of the CAMHS outpatient teams and works with all other children and young people accepted by CAMHS outpatient service who do not fall into the remit of any of the other specialist teams.

The Neurodevelopmental team is a group of healthcare professionals who specialise in neurodivergence. Neurodivergence is the term for when someone’s brain processes, learns, and/or behaves differently from what is considered “typical”. People are considered to be neurodevelopmentally different if they are diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), among other conditions. This team is a sub-team of the generic outpatient team and undertake the assessment and diagnosis of children and young people referred to CAMHS outpatients due to concerns about neurodivergence.

The Intensive Community Support team (ICST) are a team of mental health clinicians who offer a higher level of support in the community than our other CAMHS outpatient teams. They support under 18’s who are having significant difficulties with regulating their emotions effectively and, as a result, may be engaging in behaviours that are deemed risky or problematic to themselves or those around them.