The children’s champion has questioned whether the government is doing enough to promote an online counselling service for young people.

Tim Baker says that while take-up for a similar online service for adults has been strong, more could be done to promote the scheme available for 11- to 17-year-olds.

In Tynwald last week Mr Baker (Ayre and Michael) asked Health and Social Care Minister David Ashford whether teachers, social workers and youth workers had been made ’sufficiently aware’ of the service, Kooth, for those in the 11 to 17 age bracket.

Mr Baker added: ’Given that now people can self-refer, does he think there will be benefit in going out and communicating more widely that this service does exist, because we know that this is an area of increasing need, and it may be a way of taking pressure off some of the other services such as GPs and also CAMHS (child and adolescent mental health service).’

The minister agreed: ’Certainly engagement is absolutely key and making sure that people know the services are there to access, so most certainly we do work with education to try and promote services such as this.’

He said that it was an 18-month trial of the schemes.

’We are very early days yet, it has only really been up and running since June,’ he added. ’But what we have seen so far is very positive and I think it gives us something massively to build upon.’

Since a soft launch in April and a formal launch in June, there have been 724 new registrations on the adult service, Qwell, and 161 new registrations on Kooth. This led to 3,239 separate logins for Qwell, and 1,117 separate logins for Kooth.

People can self refer via the Kooth or Qwell websites.