CAMHS

Who we are

The RAFT Service is a tier three service, part of Somerset NHS Foundation Trust’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service. We work closely with our community mental health teams and also provide support to our community eating disorder service, forensic CAMHS, national deaf CAMHS, CAMHS Liaison team, and our Somerset team for early psychosis.

We have a good understanding of the many therapeutic approaches that help to support a wide range of difficulties. Where possible we would try to allocate a clinician with the skill base that best meets the needs you shared with us at our first meeting or in the referral sent to us.

We work across Somerset, providing brief interventions to young people who might need our teams urgently, as well as their families and carers. We support people when they are most unwell with a range of mental health difficulties, acute mental distress, high levels of complex risk, self-injury, suicidal thoughts, and intent.

The referrals must be submitted via:

• CAMHS Single Point of Access (SPA) – when the young person needs urgent assessment and neither SPA nor the community CAMHS teams have capacity to offer an appointment within a safe timeframe.
• Somerset CAMHS community teams – when the young person’s risk is increasing, and extra support is needed to prevent the need for hospital admission.
• CAMHS Liaison teams based at out-of-area hospitals – when having assessed a young person following presentation to the out of area A&E department, and who needs urgent follow-up. The young person must be registered with a Somerset GP.
• Out of area teams – when working with a young person who has been in a residential placement or specialist hospital outside of Somerset and is now returning to live in Somerset.

Note: this team does not accept self-referrals.

The team is made up of registered and unregistered clinicians, including mental health nurses, social workers, occupational therapists, specialist child and adolescent psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, child and family support workers, team secretaries, team managers and an operational manager who oversees the whole service.