Report:Evaluation of a Child and Adolescent Harmful Behaviour Service
By Reports & Resources, , ,

The Child and Adolescent Harmful Behaviour Service (CAHBS) is a newly developed service within the overall remit of the Thames Valley Young People’s Forensic Service (TVYPFS).

The CAHBS team provides advice, consultation, assessment and intervention, as appropriate, for young people in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire about whom there are concerns in relation to sexually harmful behaviour.

The aims of this evaluation have been to:

  • Review activity and outcomes from a year’s operation of the new service across Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire
  • Assess responses to the new service over the same period from professionals, families and carers.

This report, commissioned by the Department of Health, has been undertaken by Solutions in Public Health (SPH). It has sought to provide an overall evaluation of the service from a variety of available information provided by the CAHBS team for the period April 1st 2012 until March 31st 2013. This includes:

  • Analysis of successive cases open to the team at any time between 1st April to 31st March 2013 to quantify and describe the input provided by the CAHBS team
  • Interviews with referrers to the CAHBS team from a variety of agencies to assess levels of satisfaction with the service and to highlight possible areas for improvement
  • Interviews with senior managers (stakeholders) in a number of agencies who have a strategic role in multiagency service development for children and young people
  • Interviews with the families and carers of service users to assess levels of satisfaction with the service and potential areas for improvement
  • Summary of the range of non-clinical activities undertaken by the CAHBS team
  • A number of case vignettes provided by the CAHBS team to highlight the types of clinical work undertaken.

This evaluation has demonstrated that the CAHBS service has seen the type of children and young people that the service was set up to support and has received referrals from a wide range of agencies across Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

The 156 children and young people that the CAHBS team worked with were complex in terms of their needs and in the number of agencies with which they had contact at the time of referral. There was formal statutory social care involvement in more than half (52%) of all cases, and 40% had statements of special educational need or were attending a pupil referral unit.