"CAMHS times"

My child was referred to the CAMHS service and it was a god-send. I have no issues with the quality of the service we have received.

However, appointments were only available during the hours of 9: 15am and 3: 45pm. this meant that unless we could get the first appointment of the day, my child missed pretty much the whole morning off school. The child was doing GCSE's and after a several weeks of appointments, the school started to express some concerns about the impact of missing a half day a week was having on my child's studies - to be fair it was a concern I shared.

It also meant my child was having to 'make excuses' to school classmates who kept asking where he was all the time (there are only so many times you can tell people you are 'at the dentist' ) and a couple of the other kids began to suspect why my child was not in class - this plus the amount of school work they were missing was stressing my child out even more!

Is there no way the CAMHS service could be more flexible with the appointments to try and minimise the impact on school studies and make the appointments 'less visible' to class mates?