Our service provides psychiatric assessment, treatment and management to Tayside's children and young people from birth to school-leaving age.  We also provide tertiary care inpatient services for a wider area.

Based in the Centre for Child Health, Dundee and at Murray Royal Hospital, Perth, our teams include Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists, specialist Nurses, Occupational Therapists and Social Workers.  We are able to offer a variety of treatments including medication (where appropriate) and psychological therapies.  Most of the children and young people we see need care packages with more than one treatment.

We accept referrals from:

We prioritise referrals based on clinical need.  This means that, like most NHS services, routine referrals are placed on a waiting list but children and young people with more severe disorders will be seen sooner.  Emergency Referrals can be seen within hours.

Tertiary Care Services

Our service includes two in-patient units which accept patients from Tayside and other Scottish health board areas.  One unit - the Young People's Unit - looks after teenagers of secondary-school age, and our Children's Unit provides a mix of day-patient and in-patient treatment to primary-school age children.  Both units provide more intensive psychiatric assessment and treatment than it is possible to offer in the community.  The implication is that patients usually have problems

• which are complex and difficult to understand
• or which need intensive and highly-structured care
• or where children and young people are too ill to be treated as out-patients.

As we are very specialised units we only accept referrals from child and adolescent psychiatry teams.

Psychiatric Emergencies

A child psychiatrist is on-call 24 hours a day, every day to see children and young people experiencing psychiatric emergencies.  Referrals to the on-call child psychiatrist can be made by general practitioners and hospital doctors only.

Contact Us

Links to other child and adolescent mental health sites

www.rcpsych.ac.uk/public/pubfs.htm
The Royal College of Psychiatrists factsheets on Mental Health and Growing Up

www.youngminds.org.uk
Young Minds - the children's mental health charity

www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/focus
Web discussion group for professionals interested in child & adolescent mental health

Learning Disability Nursing Service

The Learning Disability Nursing Service is community based and works with children who have been referred from birth to school age.  Assessment of children, young people and their families is undertaken and therapeutic interventions planned.  This is done in consultation with families, school and other relevant professionals.  Each child's case is reviewed and evaluated as required.

A high proportion of our work is with children and young people with challenging behaviours.  Liaising with other professionals and specialist teams involved we develop management plans to assist in the modification of the behaviours and give practical help to carers.

The Community Nurse provides training and education on various issues such as social skills, medication,epilepsy, to children, young people, their families and carers.

Community Nurses also provide training to multidisciplinary groups and voluntary organisations.