Newsletter from the PMHA Convenor

The PMHA Newsletter – March 2019

Dr Sheila Peters, Convenor

Welcome to my first members’ newsletter for the PMHA!

We’re planning for this to become a regular feature, to keep you in touch with what’s happening in the world of paediatric mental health.

We recently had another successful two day winter meeting, at its usual venue of Highgate House in Creaton, near Northampton. Feedback was enthusiastic and the great presentations will be emailed to the attendees. If you weren’t there this year, hopefully you will be in 2020! Keep an eye on the website for dates and details.

There’s also the PMHA session at the RCPCH Spring meeting in Birmingham. We are on the afternoon of Tuesday 14th May. This year we’re with the Clinical Ethics special interest group. Hope to see you there!

The Mental Health CSAC are working hard on a Mental Health SPIN module, which we are hoping to be ready to launch later in 2019. We’re delighted to report that a Mental Heath Grid trainee has just been appointed, in the East of England Deanery.

The PMHA is involved with the Mental Health in Paediatric Care working group at the RCPCH, with 3 work streams – research and outcomes, training and standards, and influence and advocacy. We’ll post news of this in future newsletters.

And now…

There is such a lot going on in paediatric mental health at the moment, the executive committee members simply can’t provide all the inputs requested to various national projects. Would ‘you’, as a PMHA member, be interested in getting involved in one of the projects, on behalf of the PMHA? Here are the things we need help with at the moment:

1. MindEd – The MindEd consortium meet a couple of times a year and PMHA input is needed.

2. SNOMED-CT – A national vocabulary of clinical phrases for use within health and care systems. As an RCPCH specialty group, the PMHA needs to contribute a bank of mental health terms to the project, and we’d love some help to do this. So if the IT side of clinical work floats your boat, please get in touch!

3. Consultations on NICE draft quality standard for a service model for people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour. If you’d like to contribute, we can send you the draft for comment.

If you’re interested, please click here to contact the PMHA.

#Newsletter