Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure children and young people with complex mental health needs are cared for in safe and therapeutic environments.

We have conducted a rapid review into mental health inpatient settings, including for children and young people with complex mental health needs, with a specific focus on how we use data and evidence to identify risks to safety and bring about improvements to outcome-based, therapeutic care. The findings were published on 28 June 2023, and the Government will publish a response in due course.

We are working with the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch to prepare for the launch of a national investigation into mental health inpatient services in England once the new statutory investigatory body, the Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB), has been established in October. The scope is being refined but is likely to include issues such as how young people with mental health needs can be better cared for, how providers can learn from tragic deaths that take place in their care, how out-of-area placements are handled, and how staffing models can be improved. Across all these themes, the HSSIB will also be looking at how data is used by providers.

NHS England has established a three-year Mental Health, Learning Disability and Autism Inpatient Quality Transformation Programme which seeks to tackle the root causes of unsafe, poor-quality inpatient care in mental health, learning disability and autism settings. The programme is undertaking a review of children and young people’s inpatient services to support development of a new model of inpatient care for specialist services that can support localised treatment in the least restrictive environment but also ensure inpatient care is part of a seamless pathway that delivers quality care.