Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he has taken to reduce the average waiting time for treatment for an eating disorder.

The Government is committed to ensuring that everyone with an eating disorder has access to timely treatment. We have established a waiting time standard to improve access to eating disorders services for children and young people so that by 2020/21 95% of children with an eating disorder will receive treatment within one week for urgent cases and within four weeks for routine cases.

Latest figures published in the Mental Health Five Year Forward View Dashboard indicate that NHS England is on track to meet that standard with 76.9% of all patients starting urgent treatment within one week and 83.1% of patients starting routine treatment within four weeks. This information is for the third quarter of 2017-18.

The Government is investing £150 million to expand eating disorder community-based care and as a result 70 dedicated new or extended services are now either open or in development. This means at least 3,350 children and young people a year will receive swift, effective eating disorder treatment in the community.

To further improve adult eating disorder care a pathway, the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health in partnership with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence is developing a pathway and detailed implementation guidance for providers. The pathway will be fully informed by the available evidence and the views of experts and will increase healthcare professionals’ awareness of the early signs and symptoms of eating disorders so that they are able to refer without delay.