The Triangle of Care for Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services A Guide for Mental Health Professionals

Carers Trust has developed the Triangle of Care for Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services (CYP MHS) as a supplementary guide to complement the Triangle of Care (Carers Trust, 2013) and to help mental health professionals in CYP MHS to be better able to identify, understand and support carers.

Key points

• The new CYP MHS assessment tool, aims to be more relevant to CYP MHS, enabling CYP MHS teams to get a true picture of how they engage with carers and families and support the creation of action plans to achieve further improvement

About the resource

The original Triangle of Care guide was launched in July 2010 by The Princess Royal Trust for Carers (now Carers Trust) and the National Mental Health Development Unit to highlight the need for better involvement of carers and families in the care planning and treatment of people with mental ill-health.

The Triangle of Care was developed to address the clear evidence from carers that they need to be listened to and consulted more closely.

The Triangle of Care approach was initially developed by carers and sought to improve carer-professional engagement in acute inpatient services. It has been successful in effecting positive change for carers by encouraging joined-up working between the carer, the person using services and professionals. It has now been extended to cover all services within a mental health service whether an inpatient, community or specialist service. Carers frequently report that their involvement in care is not adequately recognised and their expert knowledge of how the person with mental health issues is when well is not valued and included in care planning.