Mental Health Admissions to Paediatric Wards Study (MAPS)

Some children and young people (CYP) become so unwell because of their mental health that they need an admission to hospital, often at first to the general children’s ward at a local hospital. Children’s wards and the health professionals working on them have always had this role, but recently (especially since the pandemic) the numbers of CYP needing to be admitted has increased.

CYP also seem to be more unwell when they are admitted too for example needing to be admitted under the mental health act or needing feeding tubes to provide fluids and nutrition. Children’s wards weren’t designed for this and sometimes the health care professionals working on them haven’t had enough training in looking after unwell CYP with mental health problems. Staff from children’s wards across the country are reporting that they are finding supporting CYP admitted with mental health problems really challenging.

Even though this not a new problem there is very little research into CYP with mental health problems admitted to general paediatric wards. We don’t know the exact size of the problem, or what factors affect how well CYP do on wards. There is no research looking at the experiences of young people and their families when admitted to general children’s wards because of their mental health. This is important information at the moment as services are struggling to cope and the NHS needs to understand what needs to change to develop and improve care. This study has designed a study to research the above issues in detail. In particular, we are seeking to investigate what factors influence decisions to admit CYP to paediatric wards for primary MH problems, including why other services were not used, the nature of the care given, treatment outcomes or ongoing treatment, and potential use of other services in the future. 

We believe that this research is important and needed. It will look in detail at a really serious health care problem at the moment for how CYP are treated and have access and care for their mental health. It will impact positively by providing the information needed to develop the way care is provided for CYP and families. We aim to generate a Theory of Change (ToC) model to positively impact upon quality of care for CYP presenting in a MH crisis to acute paediatric services who are admitted.

In this study we will study children’s wards to learn about admissions of CYP because of mental health in detail, we will gather information about MH crisis admissions from 15 paediatric wards, across different areas in England over a period of 6 months (we aim to gather information about 720 cases in total). This information will be collected using a reporting system, via a secure online platform (called RedCap) which will be transferred and stored safely on UCL systems (called the UCL Data Safe Haven).

We will also interview CYP who were admitted because of their mental health from 5 of these 15 hospitals, as well as families and health professionals who looked after them. We aim to complete interviews with 36 CYP, 15 families and 36 professionals in total. For this part of the study we want to learn more about the views and experiences of CYP, families and health professionals during admissions to paediatric wards. These interviews will take place virtually via a secure UCL platform.

If you have reached this page because you have scanned a QR code from a poster in your local hospital, there is a possibility that you are a participant in this study. If you have any further questions about this study, please use the contact info from the poster to speak to the research team at the hospital. If you do not want your data to be included in this study, please reach out to the contact provided on the poster who will make sure that your data is not collected or is removed from this study. Please do not try to reach the UCL research team to speak about the study, this is to protect your identity and ensure that the UCL research team does not collect any identifying information.

All data analysed by UCL in this project will be completely anonymous, and the legal basis for the use of this data is that this is a task in the public interest.  We will hold this data securely within UCL for 10 years for this research, unless a patient or family member has asked that this data be deleted from this study. Further information on UCL data protection and privacy policies are available here:https://www.ucl.ac.uk/legal-services/privacy

Contact Information (general project enquiries):

Kirsty Phillips

MAPS Project Manager

Email: kirsty.phillips.14@ucl.ac.uk