Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether NHS mental health and health trusts are required to inform his Department of their capacity to admit patients with very specific mental health needs to places where appropriate care is available; and whether his Department issues guidelines to such trusts on the maximum distance from a patient's home and families such patients can be so placed.

For those services where NHS England holds direct commissioning responsibility via its Specialised Commissioning function, providers work with the Specialised Commissioning Teams to manage local capacity and ensure patients are treated as close to home as possible. Where this is not possible every effort is taken to bring the patient back as close to home as possible as soon as possible. This work is complemented by NHS England delivering on its commitments to increase the number of beds for mothers and babies and for children and young people. The aim of this work is to align provision to population needs. Further work is underway with partner organisations such as Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service to similarly align adult secure beds to local population need and minimise out of area referrals.

For non-specialist inpatient care (adult acute beds) commissioned by local clinical commissioning groups, a new dataset has been established to provide transparency of system pressures by reporting monthly about the number of people who are sent out of area (i.e. indicating a lack of capacity locally). There is a national ambition to end the practice of sending people out of area inappropriately by 2021, ensuring that people can always access a bed locally when they need to. The monthly reports, which show the definition of out of area placements, reporting and data quality increasing, can be found at the following link:

http://content.digital.nhs.uk/oaps

There is no prescribed distance of what constitutes an out of area placement. The national definition (published by the Department) was consulted on widely, including large service user groups. There was clear consensus that a definition should not emphasise a particular distance but rather requires local and clinical interpretation, supported by a set of key principles which focus on the importance of maintaining continuity of care and connection to family, friends and local support networks.