Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-01-13.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how his Department (a) identified and (b) supported children of parents with mental illness.

Alistair Burt

We have changed the law to improve how young carers and their families including those of parents with mental illness are identified and supported. These new duties came into effect in April 2015. Changes introduced through the Children and Families Act 2014 consolidate and simplify the legislation relating to young carers’ assessments, make rights and duties clearer to both young people and practitioners, extend the right to an assessment of needs of all young carers regardless of who they care for or what type of care they provide and make it clear to local authorities that they must carry out an assessment of a young carer’s needs for support on request or on the appearance of need.

These new provisions work alongside those in the Care Act 2014 for assessing adults to enable ‘whole family approaches’ to assessment and support. This means that when a child is identified as a young carer, the needs of everyone in the family will be considered in the first place.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Report CR164 Parents as patients: Supporting the needs of patients who are parents and their children published in January 2011 and available at

http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/usefulresources/publications/collegereports/cr/cr164.aspx

sets out the College’s position on how the needs of parents and children can be managed and dealt with sensitively in the case of parental mental illness.

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