Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent progress his Department has made on reducing the backlog of children and young people waiting for mental health services in Leicestershire.

Child and adolescent mental health services work with young people and their families from across Leicester, Leicestershire, and Rutland. The service also links with other children’s services, such as early help, schools, and social care to provide a multi-agency approach.

Leicestershire Partnership Trust is taking the following steps to reduce the backlog of patients waiting for mental health services:

- timely discharge of children and young people who have completed a course of intervention to ensure flow through the service and reduced waits;

- ascertain if group work is an appropriate option to ensure early support, preventing further waits;

- clinical staff are asked to consider if they are able to work additional hours to increase capacity;

- a robust recruitment and retention plan to reduce vacancies, which will increase capacity to offer more sessions and/or interventions; and

- service wide capacity and demand work to ensure all available service capacity is used.

The following are some of the measures the Mental Health Support Teams in Schools service has in place to manage waits:

- weekly allocation meetings to prevent children and young people waiting beyond four weeks; and

- where there is a situation where a child or young person has been waiting for longer than four weeks, a referral would be allocated to a practitioner outside of the referral area to ensure the quickest access and to reduce waiting time, and a phone consultation would be offered to determine whether the child or young person can be signposted to another service.