Paediatric Nursing Skills for Australian Nurses

Introduction

This chapter will provide you with the fundamental skills for working with children, young people and their families to promote mental health. Adolescent mental health and wellbeing are covered in more detail elsewhere in this text, but it is important to acknowledge that good mental health is an important goal from birth (and even before birth), throughout childhood and into adolescence. Some adolescent mental health disorders are adolescent limited – that is, they begin and end in the period of adolescence – but mostly mental health and mental health disorders are experienced along a continuum. Indeed, as you will learn from this chapter, temporal assessment of children's behaviours is paramount in any assessment of mental health. As children mature, their behaviours change accordingly. Behaviours that can be expected among young children should disappear as they mature, such as the inability to regulate emotions, or to experience empathy for others. It is therefore imperative that mental health and behavioural assessments are not completed in one encounter. Paediatric mental health clinicians view the child or young person as a representative of a family system. This means that the family is necessarily incorporated into every facet of care, including assessment, planning, treatment and evaluation of care. Children and young people, their parents and guardians, families, school and broader communities are all considered in the planning for optimal mental healthcare service delivery.

Children and young people are actually at high risk of mental health disorders, and in Australia 8.3 per cent of children and young people live with mild, moderate or severe mental disorders (Lawrence et al., 2016). Since the first Australian survey of children's mental health was reported in 2000, the prevalence of children's mental health disorders has been stable. The National Youth Mental Health Initiative launched by the Australian Government in 2005 (Headspace) has focused on increasing prevention and treatment services for children and young people. It seems that for children identified as having mental health disorders, the uptake of services is high. But there continues to be a need for improving the prevention and early intervention strategies and services, especially for those children and young people already experiencing mental health problems.