What will it mean for me?
If you are a CAMHS clinician it can be hard to figure out what your job plan might look like if your team implemented CAPA. So here’s a rough guide…
Core Work
Let’s say you work full-time for 10 sessions (half days). Perhaps half of these will be in core work (5 sessions). So Monday afternoon could be a Choice clinic. In the remaining 4 sessions of Core Partnership work you will take on and treat new cases. Your manager will have done your capacity numbers and this will be about 10-12 new cases per quarter i.e. a bit less than 1 per week. You will have chosen when you want to do these by opting into 10-12 ‘Partnership slots’ in the Partnership diary.
These are the only bits of your diary you have ‘given up’: the 2 Choice slots on Monday afternoon and the 10-12 Partnership appointments i.e. about 3 appointments a week. The rest of your diary is your own! One session of the week will be the team meeting. In that there may be a range of activities - CPD, business- but there will certainly be small peer group supervision. This is a weekly opportunity to talk about your ongoing work. There won’t be a long whole team weekly referrals meeting, as this will be dealt with by daily screening or by a small team.
Specific Work
The rest of your clinical time (4 sessions) will be spent either using your Specific skills in a more formal way such as CBT, systemic teams, psychodynamic work, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprogramming (EMDR) etc or in other tasks such as Looked After Children (LAC) consultations, management, lead professional roles, local Youth Inclusion Support Panel (YISP) meetings, supervising others or trainees etc.
Team Away Days
You will have whole team away days once per quarter with an agenda set by yourselves with opportunities for learning and thinking and some fun!
Summary
Your experience of your own work is that you have manageable activity targets, which allow you to work hard but feel able to stop when this work is done. And your job plan will have a wide range of tasks in it, some of which are also developmental. Your experience of the team will be of a learning environment as the extended core skills and the peer group supervision built in really encourage these. You will find you are working more collaboratively with the young people and families and a huge stress is likely to be lifted, as you will have no external or internal waits.