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Person/ organisation responsible: Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (Laura Mingins and Beth Knowles)

The Optimistic Minds production on young people and mental health continues to inform our work around mental health, particularly it has put some of the barriers faced by young people front of mind. We will be responding to the national Covid inquiry and intend on using evidence from the performance to inform this work.

Prompted by the performance, we have conducted a review of complaints we’ve received about CAMHS to identify trends.

We are engaging with the team responsible for the Government’s Mental Health review with a view to feeding in insight from our data.

To improve our data, we are strengthening our systems to help us to develop a more sophisticated and intersectional understanding of issues in public services across protected characteristic groups. This work will help us to better identify trends in complaints from young people.

But we know that we don’t get enough complaints from some groups. To help us to close the gaps in our data and derive broader insight on the issues in public services, we have launched a new outreach programme and are planning regional visits to raise awareness of our service with advocacy groups operating locally. We have discussed internally how we can improve representation of the voices of young people in this programme, which is at an early pilot stage.

More widely, we are considering how we can use more participatory techniques, including theatre, in other areas of our work.