A new children’s gender identity clinic is set to open after a year of delays and the closure of the heavily scrutinized Tavistock service.

Responsibility for the care of around 250 patients treated at the Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) run by Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust will be officially transferred to the new clinic on Monday.

Around 5,000 children and young people are awaiting referral to new clinics in the north and south of England.

They were originally planned to be up and running by spring 2023, but plans were delayed due to the “complex” set-up of what NHS England described at the time as a “brand new service”.

The new center will be led by Great Ormond Street Hospital in London and Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool.

Health Secretary Maria Caulfield said the new clinic would include “experts in safeguarding, neurodiversity and mental health to ensure children are protected”.

NHS England hopes they will become the first of up to eight specialist centers over the next two years, describing their opening as “the first step in building a new model of comprehensive support for children, young people and their families” .

In 2020, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) deemed GIDS inadequate, saying the service was difficult to access and young people were waiting more than two years for their first appointment.

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Cass Review prompts Tavistock service shutdown

this Tavistock service outage A review has raised the need for single units to be scrapped and recommended the creation of regional services to better support young people.

The review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, follows a sharp increase in GIDS referrals, with more than 5,000 referrals made in 2021/22, compared with less than 250 a decade ago.

Dr Cass’s interim report, released in February 2022, highlighted the lack of long-term evidence and data collection to understand what happens to children and young people taking prescription medicines.

She added that GIDS did not collect routine and consistent data, “which means the outcomes and pathways children and young people receive through the service cannot be accurately tracked”.

Her final report is expected to be completed in the coming weeks.

In March, NHS England confirmed that children would Gender identity clinic no longer prescribes puberty blockersThe government welcomed the move, calling it a “landmark decision”. These drugs are now only available to children as part of clinical research trials.