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BACKGROUND: Liaison psychiatry provision for children and young people in England is poorly evaluated. AIMS: We sought to evaluate paediatric liaison psychiatry provision and develop recommendations to improve practice. METHOD: The liaison psychiatry surveys of England (LPSE) cross-sectional surveys engage all liaison psychiatry services in England. Services are systematically identified by contacting all acute hospitals with emergency departments in England. Questions are developed in consultation with NHS England and the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Faculty of Liaison Psychiatry, and updated based on feedback. Responses are submitted by email, post or telephone. Questions on paediatric services were included from 2015 (LPSE-2), and we analysed data from this and the subsequent four surveys. RESULTS: The number of acute hospitals with access to paediatric liaison psychiatry services increased from 29 (15.9%) in 2015 to 46 (26.6%) in 2019, compared with 100% provision for adults. For LPSE-4, only one site met the Core-24 criteria of 11 full-time equivalent mental health practitioners and 1.5 full-time equivalent consultants, and for LPSE-5, just two sites exceeded them. Acute hospitals with access to 24/7 paediatric liaison psychiatry services increased from 12 to 19% between LPSE-4 and LPSE-5. The proportion of paediatric liaison psychiatry services based offsite decreased from 30 to 24%. CONCLUSIONS: There is an unacceptable under-provision of paediatric liaison psychiatry services compared with provision for adults. Number of services, staffing levels and hours of operation have increased, but continued improvement is required, as few services meet the Core-24 criteria.

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The distressing reality that mental healthcare for children and young people in acute trust settings in the UK is woefully underprovided is not news. But with acute trust debts being written off, hospital trusts and commissioners of services have a timely opportunity to address this age- and condition-based discrimination.Delivering a just service for under-18s depends on attitude, resources and adequate knowledge of the tasks involved. This article aims to describe the current landscape, summarise the arguments for better integrating mental healthcare into physical healthcare settings, articulate the tasks involved and the challenges for commissioning and providing, and finally share examples of current service models across the country.Ultimately, commissioning and provider choices will be constrained by resource pressures, but this article aims to underscore why commissioning and providing a portmanteau 'no wrong door' hospital service for children, young people and families is worth the headache of thinking outside old commissioning and provider boxes.

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INTRODUCTION: Online resources are an important source of information about mental health issues and services for children and young people. Our service's website had an out-of-date appearance and was aimed at professionals. More importantly, comments in our routinely collected patient experience data indicated that service users did not know what to expect when coming to our service. METHODS: We followed the model for improvement by testing out changes in plan, do, study and act cycles that included a review of recently updated child and adolescent mental health services' and youth charities' websites, designing a new web page for our service and then testing out the website in focus groups. We used routinely collected patient experience data to assess impact on wider patient satisfaction. RESULTS: Focus groups involving patients, parents and professionals judged the new website to be clearer, more attractive and easier to understand. Routine patient experience data did not reveal any website-specific feedback. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates that it is easy and possible to create an attractive and accessible website for a mental health service using quality improvement methodology. In order to capture and integrate ongoing feedback about a service's website from service users, routinely collected patient experience measures would need to ask specific questions related to this area. In this study, preproject and postproject patient experience data did not generate any specific comments.

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SUMMARY: The author reflects on the Norwegian inpatient service descriptions contained in Wilkinson's article, considering the challenges laid out in his piece from the perspective of a child and adolescent psychiatrist working in a hospital crisis setting, as well as within the context of child and adolescent mental healthcare staffing across the UK.

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