Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps his Department has taken to reduce the time taken to diagnose people with bipolar disorder.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
The NHS Long Term Plan commits to investing £2.3 billion extra funding a year in expanding and transforming mental health services by March 2024, enabling an extra two million people, including people with bipolar disorder, to be treated by mental health services within the National Health Service.
Through the NHS Long Term Plan, we are also expanding community mental health services. This includes new integrated community models for adults with severe mental illness including bipolar disorder. These new models are still in the early stages, and will take time to embed nationally, but will give at least 370,000 adults greater choice and control over their care and support them to live well in their communities by March 2024.
The Department also provided an additional £500 million in 2021/22 to accelerate our expansion plans and help address waiting times for mental health services. The NHS is also working towards implementing five new waiting time standards for people requiring mental healthcare in both accident and emergency and in the community, to ensure timely access to the most appropriate, high-quality support.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that implementation of the suicide prevention strategy will take into account the needs of people with bipolar.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
The new suicide prevention strategy for England is a five-year strategy which sets out the Government’s ambition for suicide prevention. It is a multi-sector and cross-government suicide strategy, with actions from a wide range of organisations that will be delivered over the next few years. The Department has established a £10 million Suicide Prevention Grant Fund to run from 2023 to March 2025 to support voluntary, community or social enterprise organisations, including those who support people with bipolar, to deliver suicide prevention activity.
The Department, alongside NHS England, intends to explore opportunities to improve the quality of care for patients with mental health diagnoses and ensure compliance with National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines. This includes patients diagnosed with affective disorders, including depression and bipolar, who accounted for 42% of all patient suicides in England between 2010 and 2020.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to make financial support available for patients with (a) avoidant restrictive food intake disorder and (b) other eating disorders to help with the cost of living.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
We have no plans to do so. Information on the support available to help with the cost of living is available at the following link:
https://www.gov.uk/cost-of-living
We have increased investment in children and young people's community eating disorder services every year, with this funding growing by £54 million in 2023/24. Over the five years from 2019/20, we will have also invested an extra £1 billion in community mental health care for adults with severe mental illness, including eating disorders, giving 370,000 more adults greater choice and control over their care and supporting them to live well in their communities.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the report entitled Fit for the Future, published by the Royal College of General Practitioners in May 2023, whether he is taking steps to (a) increase the amount of space available for GP surgeries to operate in under current conditions and (b) secure additional space for training GPs in the future; and whether he is taking steps with Cabinet colleagues to increase the level of funding available for upgrading NHS premises.
Answered by Neil O'Brien
The Government has allocated over £4 billion annually in capital funding to systems to invest in maintaining the National Health Service estate and address safety issues. In addition, in our primary care recovery plan we committed to changing local authority planning guidance to raise the profile of primary care facilities when planners are considering how developer contributions and funds from new housing developments are allocated.
We want general practitioners (GPs) to deliver the best quality of care to patients and will continue our work to assess what is needed to enable them to deliver services effectively in GP premises. As part of the ambitions set out in the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan and the planned recruitment drive, we will consider the best use of GP premises to meet the needs of growing and ageing populations and the expanding healthcare teams needed to support them.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to include proposals to tackle the socioeconomic causes of health inequalities in the Major Conditions Strategy.
Answered by Neil O'Brien
The Strategy’s approach will be rooted in the best understanding of the evidence to tackle the major conditions which contribute to the burden of disease in England, namely Cancers; Cardiovascular diseases, including stroke and diabetes; Chronic respiratory diseases; Dementia; Mental ill health and Musculoskeletal disorders.
These areas account for around 60% of total Disability Adjusted Life Years in England. Tackling them is critical to achieving our manifesto commitment of gaining five extra years of Healthy Life Expectancy by 2035, and our levelling up mission to narrow the gap in Healthy Life Expectancy in the least and most deprived areas by 2030 which should take account of socio-economic factors.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for the Home Department on mental health support services that are available to asylum seekers and refugees.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
Officials from the Department of Health and Social Care are working with the Home Office and other Government departments to support access to mental health support services by asylum seekers and refugees.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to incorporate mental health support and prevention in the Major Conditions Strategy.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
Mental Health is one of the group of conditions included in the Major Conditions Strategy. The strategy will aim to identify actions in the areas of prevention, treatment and long term management of care to improve outcomes for individuals across the six major condition groups.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people were diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in each of the last five years; what types of treatment are provided to such people in secondary care; and how many such people received each treatment in each year.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
The information requested is not available due to the limitations of current diagnosis data on within the Mental Health Services Dataset. Only around 20% to 25% of cases in the dataset have a specific diagnosis recorded; any data provided on obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) diagnoses would therefore represent an undercount.
Regarding treatment types, the National Health Service may offer talking therapies and medication, such as antidepressants, separately or together. Talking therapies for OCD may include, but are not limited to, cognitive behavioural therapy, exposure and response prevention, and group therapy.
Procedure data relating to different types of treatment is recorded through the use of SNOMED codes. Not all providers are submitting SNOMED codes for the years requested and as such this incomplete data is not included in the response.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people were diagnosed with mental health issues in each of the last five years; what types of treatment are provided to such people in secondary care; and how many such people received each treatment in each year.
Answered by Maria Caulfield - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade) (Minister for Women)
The information requested on mental health diagnoses is not available due to limitations of current diagnosis data within the Mental Health Services Dataset. Only around 20% to 25% of cases in the dataset have a specific diagnosis recorded, and any data provided on diagnosis numbers overall would therefore represent an undercount.
Regarding treatment types, the National Health Service may offer a range of options, including talking and other psychological therapies, medications, arts and creative therapies, social prescribing and specialist inpatient services separately or in combination.
Data relating to different types of treatment is recorded through the use of SNOMED codes. Not all providers are submitting SNOMED codes for the years requested and as such this incomplete data is not included in the response.
Asked by: Rebecca Long Bailey (Labour - Salford and Eccles)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether the NHS workforce strategy will include provisions for NHS Trusts in England to hire the additional cancer workforce needed to meet the ambition for 75 per cent of cancer patients to be diagnosed at stage I or II by 2028 as set out in the NHS Long Term Plan.
Answered by Helen Whately - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Government has committed to publishing the Long Term Workforce Plan shortly. This will include independently verified forecasts for the number of healthcare professionals required in future years, taking full account of improvements in retention and productivity. The plan will cover the whole of the NHS workforce.