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 the effectiveness of early intervention services to treat eating disorders before patients are hospitalised.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence published its guideline on ‘Eating disorders: recognition and treatment (NG69)’ on May 2017 based on the evidence available. These highlight the importance of assessing and treating eating disorders at the earliest opportunity.

The Government set up the first ever waiting time standards to improve access to eating disorder services for children and young people, supported by £30 million a year to develop 70 new or extended community eating disorder services across the country.

NHS England is on track to deliver the four-week waiting time standard for children and young people by 2020/21 and, as need continues to rise, extra investment will allow us to maintain delivery of the standard beyond 2020/21.

The NHS Long Term Plan has committed to testing four-week waiting times for adult and older adult community mental health teams, with selected local areas that will include eating disorders. This will form part of the overall testing of new models of primary and community mental health care between 2019/20 and 2020/21.