Jointly held care documents in child and adolescent mental health services: a systematic review

Young people accessing Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in the UK represent a digital native generation, but practices around digital care documents lag behind. Jointly held care documents could be a way of improving accessibility and inclusion of young people and parents/carers in care planning.

Systematic searches of MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, PsycArticles, King's Fund, Google Scholar, The Health Foundation, Social Care Online, Cochrane Library, Royal College of Psychiatrists, Web of Science and EconLit databases were conducted alongside grey literature searches. All eligible studies investigating the use of jointly held care documents in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services were included. Risk of bias was assessed using an adapted version of the Hawker critical appraisal tool.

Seven studies, from research groups in the Netherlands, the USA and Norway were included. Existing studies have looked at perceptions of quality and engagement, facilitators and barriers, clinical effectiveness and adolescent and professional acceptability. Studies have used a range of methodologies and were generally of high quality, finding that jointly held care documents were mainly positively thought of by young people and parents/carers, but there was ambivalence from healthcare professionals around information sharing and the practicalities of co-creation.

The current literature shows good acceptability of jointly held and co-created care documents amongst young people and parents. Barriers to implementation mainly exist amongst professionals.

https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/view/CRD420250652309.