Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Markham on 17 July (HL8936), when updated guidance will be available from NHS England; how the "transformation" of adult eating disorder (AED) services will be defined and its effectiveness assessed; and by what date integrated care systems will be expected to have transformed AED services.

To support services to plan and implement improvements, NHS England has developed a community mental health roadmap intended to set out the different elements which make up the delivery of the NHS Long Term Plan commitments on community mental health transformation, including eating disorders. A transformed adult eating disorder service is defined as:

- Specialist teams that are able to provide support to a spectrum of severity and different types of eating disorders;

- Able to embed lived experience in service development and delivery;

- Supporting early intervention using models such as First Episode Rapid Early Intervention for Eating Disorders (FREED) and not employing body mass index or weight thresholds;

- Working with primary care to provide clear arrangements for medical monitoring;

- Working jointly with children and young people’s services, particularly to support smooth transitions; and

- Able to accept self-referrals and referrals from primary care and voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations.

NHS England routinely monitors performance returns from integrated care systems to track progress against these deliverables.

Since April 2021, all integrated care systems have received fair-share funding to transform their adult community mental health services, including eating disorders, with the expectation that all will have transformed adult eating disorder services in place by March 2024.