Asked by: Baroness Hollins (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to ensure that people experiencing mental health problems, including those with an additional learning disability, do not have to wait for longer than 18 weeks to receive appropriate treatment.
Answered by Earl Howe - Deputy Leader of the House of Lords
Mental health and well-being is a priority for this Government. We have legislated for parity of esteem between mental and physical health and included it in our Mandate to NHS England. This makes it clear that “everyone who needs it should have timely access to evidence-based services”. This will involve extending and ensuring more open access to programmes.
In our new five-year plan for mental health, Achieving Better Access to Mental Health Services by 2020, we identified £40 million additional spending this year and freed up a further £80 million for 2015-16. This will, for the first time ever, enable the setting of access and waiting time standards in mental health services, including for people with mental health problems and learning disabilities. The standards will include:
- treatment within six weeks for 75% of people referred to the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme, with 95% of people being treated within 18 weeks;
- treatment within two weeks for more than 50% of people experiencing a first episode of psychosis; and
- £30 million targeted investment will help people in crisis to access effective support in accident and emergency.
Starting this year, the Department and NHS England will work together with mental health system partners to develop detailed proposals for the introduction of further access and waiting time standards from 2016 onwards.
Asked by: Baroness Hollins (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to ensure that people with learning disabilities are not excluded from NHS England's five-year strategic plan for National Health Service commissioners to improve quality of and access to health care, outlined in Everyone Counts: Planning for Patients 2014/15–2018/19.
Answered by Earl Baldwin of Bewdley
The Government's Mandate to NHS England, sets out our ambitions for the health service, which include an objective that NHS England ensures clinical commissioning groups work with local authorities to ensure that vulnerable people, particularly those with learning disabilities and autism, receive safe, appropriate, high quality care. NHS England sets out how it will achieve the objectives in the Mandate in its 2014-15 – 2016-17 business plan. The Government will hold NHS England to account for its achievement.
Everyone Counts: Planning for Patients 2014/15 to 2018/19sets out a framework within which commissioners will need to work with providers and partners in local government to develop five year plans to secure the continuity of sustainable high quality care for all. Building on Everyone Counts, NHS England is beginning a programme of work to consider how to improve quality of and access to health care for people with learning disabilities. Within the framework there is specific reference to Transforming Care: A national response to Winterbourne View Hospital. This is a non-negotiable item that NHS England expects to be part of every relationship between commissioners and providers. As part of this, clinical commissioning groups, local authorities and specialised commissioners should work together to implement the core specification which describes the core principles that must be present in all education, health and social care services for children, young people, adults and older people with learning disabilities and/or autism who either display, or are at risk of displaying, behaviour that challenges.
NHS England is committed to work to reduce premature mortality amongst people with learning disability, including actions in response to the Confidential Inquiry into Premature Deaths of People with Learning Disabilities.