Drop-in mental health hubs for under-25s see 40,000 young people in first six months
Evaluation of the first 24 hubs finds a third of visitors had never contacted a GP about their mental health, with waiting times for a first conversation averaging four days
Walk-in mental health hubs for people aged 11 to 25 have been used by 40,300 young people in their first six months, according to an evaluation published on Tuesday, with a third saying they had never spoken to a GP or school counsellor about their mental health before and 88% being seen within a week.
The 24 hubs, in towns including Stoke-on-Trent, Plymouth, Hull, Blackpool and Wrexham, opened between March and April on high streets and in community centres, and offer counselling, group sessions, and help with housing, benefits and employment without a referral. They were funded with £94m over three years as an alternative to child and adolescent mental health services, which in some areas have waits of more than a year for a first assessment.
The average wait for a first conversation with a worker was four days. About 61% of visitors were female, 14% were referred by a school and 9% by a GP; the remainder walked in or were brought by a friend or parent. The evaluation, by researchers at the University of Manchester, found that visitors’ self-reported anxiety scores fell by an average of 28% over eight weeks, a result the authors described as “encouraging but preliminary”.
Jade Morrissey, 19, from Stoke, visited the hub on Piccadilly in April after a friend walked her there. “I had been on a waiting list since I was 16. Nobody ever rang. I had stopped thinking of myself as somebody who was going to get help,” she said. “The first time I went I sat in the café bit for an hour and did not talk to anyone. The second time somebody said hello. That was it, really. That was the whole intervention.”
Dr Kwame Asante, clinical lead for the hub in Hull, said the absence of thresholds was the point. “In CAMHS you have to be ill enough to be seen, which means by the time you are seen you are quite ill. Here the bar is that you walked in,” he said. “About a fifth of the people we see would meet the criteria for a specialist service. The other four-fifths were never going to get anything, and now they get something.”
The Youth Wellbeing Alliance, a coalition of charities that lobbied for the model, said the figures showed a “vast, unseen demand” and called for the network to be extended to every town with a population above 50,000, which would mean about 180 hubs. The Department of Health and Social Care said a decision on expansion would be made after a 12-month evaluation.
The report also identified strains. Three hubs had closed for a day or more because of staff shortages; two had been asked by local CAMHS teams to stop accepting under-14s without a parent present. “They are being used, which is the problem and the success at the same time,” the authors wrote.
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