Nursing Skills for Children and Young People's Mental Health

This book focuses on those nursing skills that are truly valued and needed by children and young people with mental health problems.
Whilst other books have chiefly focused on mental health conditions and treatments, this book moves away from this formulaic approach and considers what children and youth themselves need most from health professionals. It shows why nursing skills are among the most precious values for patients. This focus on therapeutic relationships, establishing trust-based forms of nursing, and empowering children and young people to develop into healthy and resilient young adults has largely been neglected, despite the feedback from those who urgently need help but often struggle to find it, or are wary of seeking help and reluctant to engage.

This book focuses on the places where nurses encounter young people and seek to help them. It examines the role nurses play in specialist child and adolescent mental health settings (such as in-patient and community, as psychotherapists, and on self-harm teams) and where paediatrics nurses work with troubled young people (in emergency departments, paediatric wards and primary care). It also considers two specific areas, namely eating disorder services and consent-seeking, that could benefit from nursing skills that are currently undervalued, but are in fact invaluable.

Its focus on those skills that nurses already have, but may not be consciously using, will make this book uniquely appealing to all nurses who work with children and young people with mental health problems, regardless of the setting, and an essential guide for students and experienced professionals alike.



Laurence Baldwin  is a Assistant Professor in Mental Health Nursing at Coventry University where he leads on research methodology at postgraduate level. He spent over thirty years in the NHS working mostly in specialist Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, for the last thirteen years as a Nurse Consultant. During this time he also became an independent nurse prescriber, and represented the Royal College of Nursing at various national forums, including the CAMHS Taskforce that developed the 'Future in Mind' policy. Clinically he has interests in ADHD, Autistic Spectrum Disorders, and self-harm, as well as developing service-user led research projects. His PhD was on professional identity in CAMHS, and he recently developed an online module for the MSc Nursing for Coventry University Online.