Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the effect of recent trends in mental health nursing staff numbers on waiting times for those who require treatment for eating disorders.

Good progress is being made towards the children and young people’s eating disorder waiting time target. October to December 2018 data shows 80.7% of young people started treatment for an urgent case within one week against a target of 95%, and 86.8% of young people started treatment for a routine case within four weeks against a target of 95%.

For adults, the NHS Long Term Plan commits to “test four-week waiting times for adult and older adult community mental health teams, with selected local areas”. The exact scope and timelines of these pilots are yet to be finalised but NHS England will also consider the interfaces with specialist community mental health services, particularly where there is an existing evidence base for rapid direct access, such as adult eating disorder services.

The Department is aware of the importance of increasing the number of people working in mental health services and has made an assessment of the workforce needed to deliver timely access to mental health care. In 2017 Health Education England published ‘Stepping forward to 2020/21: The mental health workforce plan for England’, which set our ambition to deliver 21,000 new posts, to be filled by 19,000 additional staff.

The Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care asked Baroness Dido Harding to develop a Workforce Implementation Plan for the commitments set out in the NHS Long Term Plan.

This Interim Workforce Plan will be published in spring and will include an immediate 2019/20 action plan together with a more detailed vision of how the health and care workforce will transform over the next 10 years to deliver 21st century care for our patients. The plan will build on work already underway to recruit, train and importantly retain more staff to address our most immediate shortages.