Predictors of amounts of child and adolescent mental health service use

Abstract

The aim of this study was to build evidence about how to tailor services to meet the individual needs of young people by identifying predictors of amounts of child and adolescent mental health service use. We conducted a secondary analysis of a large administrative dataset from services in England was conducted using the Mental Health Services Data Set (years 2016–17 and 2017–18). The final sample included N = 27,362 episodes of care (periods of service use consisting of at least two attended care contacts and less than 180 days between care contacts) from 39 services. There were 50–10,855 episodes per service. The descriptive statistics for episodes of care were: Mage = 13 years, SDage = 4.71, range = 0–25 years; 13,785 or 50% male. Overall, there were high levels of heterogeneity in number of care contacts within episodes of care: M = 11.12, SD = 28.28, range = 2–1529. Certain characteristics predicted differential patterns of service use. For example, young people with substance use (beta = 6.29, 95% CI = 5.06–7.53) or eating disorders (beta = 4.30, 95% CI = 3.29–5.30) were particularly more likely to have higher levels of service use. To build on this, evidence is needed about predictors of child and adolescent mental health treatment outcome and whether the same characteristics predict levels of improvement as well as levels of service use.