Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the longest period of time was that a patient has had to wait for access to mental health services in the last 10 years.
The information requested has not been collected for the past 10 years. Waiting times only began being collected in April 2015 for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies, and January 2016 for Early Intervention in Psychosis and children and young people with eating disorders. In addition, quality assurance is not as robust at the level of individual records as at a system level – therefore NHS Digital advises that statistical outliers are likely to be due to data quality or data collection errors rather than an accurate record of how long individuals are waiting for treatment.