Here are two rules of thumb that can quickly give you a feel for the situation in CAMHS. Health warning: rules of thumb don’t give exact answers! They are a rough guide, so this may mean that they don’t exactly agree with each other!
If you roughly want to know:
Then this is the section for you….
You can accept the same number of referrals per week as your full-time equivalent staff.
Example: Anywhere CAMHS has 12 FTE clinical staff. They can roughly manage to accept 12 referrals per week.
The range depends on how well CAPA has been implemented, the quality of the service leadership- ship and the amount of cultural change that has occurred.
Working out…
We find that many teams can deliver between 30-40% of Choice and Core Partnership work if CAPA is fully implemented. More easily if the 1st CAPA Key Component – Leadership – is securely in place.
The percentage of Choice and Core Partnership work needed to be deployed is the number of accepted referrals per week divided by the FTE x 3.
Working out…
Example: Anywhere CAMHS accepts 12 referrals per week. Their FTE is 14. They need 12 x 3 = 36 half days deployed per week for the Choice and Core Partnership these referrals generate.
They have 14 FTE staff and so have 14 x 10 = 140 half days in the team. As they need 36 half days in Choice and Core Partnership they will need 36 / 142 = 26% of their capacity to be deployed in this Choice and Core Partnership. Should be fine!
These are rough rules of thumb. Numbers can make things seem absolute and true!
They are meant to be simple and used as a guide to where you could or should be. One key variable we have excluded to make them simpler is that an assumption is made that all staff work all the time! If you want to tune them a little more account for the fact that staff work 87% of the time (leave) and amend the numbers by 13%. This would produce
In practice, we suggest doing the team job plan and then, if the numbers are close, try it and see rather than worry about decimal places. The world is too fuzzy for that.
How many referrals can you accept per FTE?
What % of your service needs to be providing Choice and Core Partnership to manage referrals?