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Current services are failing children and adolescents with learning difficulties who suffer from additional psychological or behavioural problems, leading child psychiatrists have claimed, writes Lauren Revans.

Despite substantial evidence to suggest a much higher prevalence of mental health and behavioural problems among young people with learning difficulties than the general child and adolescent population, services for this client group remain almost non-existent, a Community Care-sponsored conference in London was told last week.

Oral, dental, visual, and speech problems in children and adolescents with learning difficulties are also often over-looked, they added.

Dr Jeremy Turk, child mental health learning disability service clinical team leader at St Georges’ Hospital, Tooting, south London, said: "It is no longer tenable for people to be unaware of the psychiatric, psychological, and behavioural needs of people with learning difficulties may have."

He suggested that child and adult mental health services should dedicate a certain part of their week – possibly two days – to dealing solely with this large group of child mental health service-users.

He also stressed the importance of breaking down the "artificial dichotomy" between child mental health and other children’s services, calling for wider multi-disciplinary teams which would include developmental psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, clinical nurse specialists, speech and language therapists, psychiatric social workers, occupational therapists, and geneticists.

Consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Sarah Bernard said there were "areas of the country where there was absolutely no CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health services) services at all".

"In-patient services are also practically non-existent," she added. "There’s a massive lack of in-patient services for the most severe mentally ill people with learning difficulties. There’s a disaster waiting to happen."

Bernard said training programmes needed to change to ensure that anybody studying child and adolescent psychiatry should also have to train in learning difficulties, and anybody training in learning difficulties should have some experience of child and adolescent psychiatry.

Vivian Hill, director of professional educational psychology at the University of London, said different professional perspectives, tensions in departmental objectives, and issues about who should pay for services, were all obstacles to joined-up thinking.

She said many people working in the learning difficulty sector were also very anxious about dealing with mental health and behavioural issues, despite their prevalence among the client group they dealt with.