Editorial: Achieving parity because ‘Our children deserve better’
Sue Bailey
Abstract
How do we finally bridge the belief and understanding gap that child and adolescent mental health really matters? In an era of unprecedented changes in commissioning, how do we make the new diverse range of commissioners deliver values-based care for children with mental health problems, and value for money for society over their lifespan?
It is therefore really important that such an informed and influential person as the UK Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, has strongly supported prevention as well as intervention for children to include at all levels and in equal measure mental health. Her report (subtitled ‘Our children deserve better: prevention pays’) provides an important summary of English child and adolescent mental health service provision and intervention (Davies, 2013).
Health inequalities and the social determinants of health are not, as Sir Michael Marmot so rightly states, a footnote to the determinants of health, they are the main issue (Strategic review of health inequalities in England post 2010, 2010). Anyone privileged to work in the field of child mental health knows that nowhere is this more relevant than in the lives of children who have mental health problems.
So what has to be believed and acted upon?
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