Mental Health Services
(asked on 24th June 2025) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 23 June 2025 to Question 60400 on Mental Health Services, how many referrals made to mental health services in (a) 2021-22, (b) 2022-23 and (c) 2023-24 by primary reason for referral that (i) began and (ii) completed treatment received the first treatment appointment within (A) fewer than 18 weeks, (B) 18 and 24 weeks, (C) 24 weeks and 12 months, (D) 12 and 18 months, (E) 18 and 24 months and (F) more than 24 months from the date of referral in each NHS Trust as of 24 June 2025.
The tables attached show, respectively, the number of referrals received by providers for mental health services, excluding NHS Talking Therapies, sorted by primary reason for referral and waiting time for entering treatment, and the number of referrals received by providers for NHS Talking Therapies services by presenting complaint, for financial years 2021/22 to 2023/24. For the first table, data for completed treatment cannot be provided as there is no definition for completed treatment.
During April 2025, 98.5% of referrals to NHS Talking Therapy services which completed treatment had entered treatment within 18 weeks of the referral starting. As a result, the numbers of individual referrals broken down by for the waiting times requested, presenting condition and provider would largely be suppressed and there may also be data errors which can incorrectly show extremely long waits. Therefore, these data have not been provided as they do not provide insight to the question and may potentially be misleading. Waiting times data for each provider can be found in the NHS monthly Talking Therapies statistics publication, which is available at the following link:
Caution should be used when interpreting this data. Comparisons at low levels and between providers may not be reflective of the performance of the provider due to high levels of suppressed values due to small numbers. Primary reason for referral is not a mandatory field and completeness levels can be relatively low and vary between providers. Furthermore, if a provider has a small number of people in a specific category, a seemingly large difference between two providers might not be statistically significant and could be due to random chance. Comparisons over time should also be interpreted with caution, as completeness in the dataset has improved over time, with the numbers of providers increasing year on year, which will impact comparisons.