In September 2020, Dorset HealthCare's CAMHS Service launched a new part of its service to help manage assessments and provide some brief lower level intervention for children and young people experiencing problems with their mental health. The service will act as the 'front door' of CAMHS and has been introduced to help reduce the wait time for assessments and treatments that young people can experience when accessing the service.

The new service, known as CAMHS Gateway, will undertake all assessments for referrals sent through to CAMHS. The service will act as the 'front door' of CAMHS and has been introduced to help reduce the wait time for assessments and treatments that young people can experience when accessing the service.

CAMHS Gateway is made up of a team of CAMHS professionals who will act as a single point of access for the CAMHS service across *BCP – they are able to offer interventions to children and young people themselves or refer them on to the core CAMHS teams for more specialist interventions if the risk to the child/young person, or the complexity is warrants that.

*Initially the service will be running only in the east of the county covering Bournemouth, Poole, and Christchurch GP surgeries. It is expected that next year the service will be rolled out across the rest of the county. In the meantime, for those within a Dorset GP, please continue to refer in the usual way.

It is hoped that this will go some way to 'filling the gap' for those children and young people who have mental health needs who perhaps have not met CAMHS criteria for intervention historically. The Mental Health Support in Schools Team (MHST) will also work alongside Gateway to ensure that the right service is offered to each child/young person.