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Asylum & Refugee Clinic (ARC)

Checked: 23-07-2023 by Next Review: 23-07-2025

Overview

The Asylum and Refugee Clinic (ARC) is a CAMHS specialist clinic that provides essential mental health support for all children and young people who are either in the UK with their family, or who have arrived in the UK unaccompanied, without a carer or family and are seeking asylum in BNSSG.

They aim to strengthen children’s mental health and emotional wellbeing by bringing together all the adults around them to understand the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and how to best support them.

The support offered helps children and young people understand and alleviate the distress they are experiencing. ARC also work with the carers and professionals in a child’s network to have the best understanding of the impacts of PTSD.

The service includes:

Assessment on whether a young person is suitable for the service in a pre-referral consultation.
After this assessment, therapy is offered based on the young person’s needs.
Therapy can involve trauma-focused therapy, including eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), children’s accelerated trauma treatment (CATT) and art therapy.
Support is also offered for network support and consultation to carers and professionals.

Please also see details of the Haven service on the Adults Asylum Seeker and Refugee Health page.

Referral

The service is available to refugee children and young people up to the age of 18 years old in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, who are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms.

Referrals can be made by the young person’s GP, school nurse or other professionals.

Referral form (also available as EMIS templates in Resource Publisher) to be completed and sent to

Email: Awp.camhsarc@nhs.net.

Telephone: 0300 124 5944

Efforts are made to ensure the accuracy and agreement of these guidelines, including any content uploaded, referred to or linked to from the system. However, BNSSG ICB cannot guarantee this. This guidance does not override the individual responsibility of healthcare professionals to make decisions appropriate to the circumstances of the individual patient, in consultation with the patient and/or guardian or carer, in accordance with the mental capacity act, and informed by the summary of product characteristics of any drugs they are considering. Practitioners are required to perform their duties in accordance with the law and their regulators and nothing in this guidance should be interpreted in a way that would be inconsistent with compliance with those duties.

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