Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of training for doctors on treatment for eating disorders.

Diagnosing and treating eating disorders is an important area of medical practice. It is included within the curriculum for training all doctors, including for general practitioners, and in more depth within training for psychiatry, particularly child and adolescent psychiatrists.

The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee’s report following up the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman’s report, ‘Ignoring the alarms: How NHS eating disorder services are failing patients’, published on 18 June, made recommendations on the education and training of doctors in treating patients with eating disorders. The Government will consider these recommendations with Health Education England, the General Medical Council and the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and will respond to the Committee’s report in due course.