In 2024 Level Up LPC led resilience planning for Christmas and New Year holiday period to ensure Cheshire and Merseyside professionals adopted a system approach to supporting young people with complex needs experiencing crisis between December and January.
Although system work to develop Appropriate Places of Care (APOC) continues for young people in crisis but who are not clinically appropriate for Tier 4 inpatient care, the aim of the resilience planning was to strengthen multi-agency working through prevention and earlier identification of crisis situations.
The evaluation of the Christmas Resilience approach highlighted many of the benefits gained from implementing the Gateway model and use of the Complex Needs Escalation and Level Up LPC led the approach to resilience planning for the December 2025 bank holidays.
Plans around APOC are continuing but as there was not a local solution ready in time, a similar approach to 2024 was adopted, taking account of the learning from the evaluation process. An engagement webinar with all stakeholders was held on 4th December 2025 which followed a number of months of meetings and shared documentation.
The webinar included a wide range of professionals such as managers on-call, Emergency Department colleagues, Social Workers and commissioners. The webinar recording, in addition to a range of resources produced, was made available on the Level Up webpages. The Level Up Commissioning Team had also engaged with an independent sector provider to explore potential solutions to the need for suitable accommodation.
Following the process for 2025 holiday period, a rapid learning meeting has been planned to inform future commissioning intentions and partnership working.
Elizabeth Collins, the Level Up Commissioning Team Systems Programme Manager reflected, “Christmas Resilience Planning during 2024 and 2025 represented an excellent opportunity to build upon the system’s significant learning during implementation of the Complex Needs Escalation Support Framework, whilst Appropriate Places of Care (APOC) continued to develop in Cheshire and Merseyside.”
Experts by Experience and professionals agreed this was a critically important process to ensure prevention and early system planning was undertaken in reducing the potential trauma young people in crisis may have experienced.
As APOC continues to mature during 2026, Christmas Resilience Planning will not be required in the same way in future, but all the valuable resources and learning gathered to date will be fully available to inform partners in developing their thinking.
