Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:02 pm on 5 November 2019.
Well, I thank David Rees for that and I completely agree that the system has needed reorientation so that it focuses on lower intensity services that prevent the escalation of young people to the specialist service that CAMHS represents. Indeed, Llywydd, I remember many times on the floor of the Assembly as the health Minister explaining that sending a young person straight to a specialist mental health service when what they really needed was a different sort of lower intensity service where they could talk to an adult about the difficult business of growing up—that that was a better investment in the future of those young people. And, as research by Hafal, the mental health charity here in Wales has demonstrated, that's what young people themselves tell us that they want.
That's why, since that period, we have invested in those services—the whole-school approach that has flown from the work done by the committee led by Lynne Neagle, where we're investing £2.5 million in bringing that about. The school counselling service that we have in schools: 11,365 young people benefited from that service last year, Llywydd; 87 per cent of them needed no onward referral, and only 3.5 per cent of them needed a referral to CAMHS. Now, that is exactly the point I think that David Rees is making, that, where you have suitable services there that can respond rapidly to a young person's needs, then it will very often mean that that young person doesn't need to have a more intensive and more specialist service. Where those things aren't available and aren't put in place in a timely way, the risk is that that young person's condition worsens and they're accelerated into the more intense end of the spectrum. That's what we would want to avoid. We'd want to make sure that the local primary mental health support service, for example—a great success story, I think, of this Assembly, brought about as a result of the Mental Health (Wales) Measure 2010—. There are now 2,384 more referrals every month to that primary care service than there were when it began in 2014. It's turned out to be immensely popular amongst patients, and it does what David Rees said: it gets alongside a young person—because it deals with people under the age of 18 as well as adults—it gets alongside them early, and tries to make sure that difficulties can be resolved without those problems becoming ones that require the intensity and the specialist knowledge that CAMHS itself provides.