Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that information on the number of children and young people accessing specialist treatment for an eating disorder is transparent.

The Government is committed to improving data and transparency on mental health, as was highlighted in the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health. The publicly available Mental Health Five Year Forward View Dashboard reports against eating disorder access and waiting time standards and captures a range of data at a local clinical commissioning groups, Sustainability and Transformation Plans and national level.

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/mental-health-five-year-forward-view-dashboard/

The Mental Health Services dataset (MHSDS) has included data regarding children and young people’s mental health since January 2016. The data collection is still experimental, with a focus on data quality and completion. Anticipating poor quality data in the early stages of the MHSDS, NHS England implemented an interim data collection via Unify2 that focused on the referral to treatment waiting time element of the Children and Young People with an Eating Disorder evidence based care pathway. This interim measure enabled collection of data and is helping to verify and improve the quality of statistics derived from the MHSDS.

This Unify2 data is available quarterly starting from Quarter 1 in 2016/2017:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/cyped-waiting-times/

The latest figures from Q3 (October – December 17) indicate that:

- 76.9% of children and young people started treatment for an urgent case within one week (236 out of 307 young people who started treatment for an urgent case did so within one week). This is against a target of 95%; and

- 83.1% of young people started treatment for a routine care within four weeks (1,238 out of 1,489 young people who started treatment for a routine case did so within four weeks). This is also against a target of 95%