What do you really need to know?

We are aware that many CAMH teams are under pressure from referrers and referrals. The workload seems endless and we feel desperate for more time, money and staff. Then we could manage!

However, our experience of visiting teams across the country, and seeing how system changes have worked in our own teams, means that we know that there are many things that can be done without waiting for increased resources.  That’s not to say that CAMHS doesn’t need a massive increase in resource (we know that it does) but that we can demonstrate this need more clearly to our commissioners if we work efficiently by applying demand and capacity analysis skills.

Demand and Capacity management does not mean working harder, just better. It is about doing the right things at the right time.  You can set the quality parameters of how you want to work and then do this work within a quality framework as efficiently as possible.  Demand and capacity analysis does not undermine quality but allows a clearer focus on it.

This paper, based on a lecture and its slides, tells you about the basic ideas of demand and capacity analysis, gives CAMHS examples and forms part of the toolkit that you can use in your own teams.

Definitions: we use direct clinical hours as our basic unit of measurement. These hours are the countable hours in front of patients and do not include all the admin, phoning, case discussion etc that is required for each case to be managed.  We have chosen this statistic, as it is easily measurable, such as the number of direct contacts per week per therapist. However it only works if all those additional tasks such as admin etc are included in the job plan. We use a rough audit standard of 8 clinical sessions per full time equivalent and, in each session, 2 direct contact clinical hours. Thus a full time equivalent (FTE) clinician will do 16 direct clinical hours out of their total available 35 hours (10 sessions of 3.5 hours).