Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of trends in waiting times for accessing mental health services.

The Government is committed to improving access to mental health services across England and ensuring that people get access to the right treatment, at the right time and in the right place.

Performance against Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) waiting time standards consistently exceeds the national targets. In March 2018, 98.7% of those people completing treatment waited less than 18 weeks for their treatment to start in England against a target of 95% and 89.2% of people completing treatment waited less than six weeks against a target of 75%. The recovery target, which states that at least 50% of people who complete treatment should move to recovery, was exceeded in March 2018 with a 52.5% recovery rate.

According to the latest data for April 2018, 74.4% of patients referred to Early Intervention in Psychosis services start treatment within two weeks (exceeding our current target of 50%).

For quarter four of 2017/18, children and young people’s eating disorder data showed that 78.9% of patients started urgent treatment within one week and 79.9% of patients started routine treatment within four weeks. This is positive progress towards meeting the 95% target for both routine and urgent cases to start treatment within four weeks and one week respectively, by 2020/21.

Further information on performance against national waiting times standards can be found in NHS England’s Five Year Forward View for Mental Health Dashboard.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/mental-health/taskforce/imp/mh-dashboard/

Through the joint health and education Green Paper on children and young people’s mental Health, we have also committed to piloting a four week waiting time for access to specialist National Health Service children and young people’s mental health services.