Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what metrics his Department is using to measure progress in improving mental health outcomes, and how these compare with those used for physical health.

The NHS Oversight Framework sets out how NHS England will assess and oversee providers and integrated care boards against a range of metrics, promoting improvement while helping to identify where organisations need support, as well as those that are performing well. This ensures public accountability for performance and provides a foundation for how NHS England works with systems and providers to support improvement.

In addition, the NHS Mental Health Services Data Set, which is internationally recognised, provides numerous metrics to track mental health outcomes. This includes the standards for NHS Early Intervention in Psychosis (EIP), that at least 60% of people with first episode psychosis have started treatment with a National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recommended package of care with a specialist EIP service within two weeks of referral, and that 95% of children with an eating disorder receive treatment within one week for urgent cases and four weeks for routine cases.

The NHS Talking Therapies Data Set also provides key metrics, including progress against the current standards that 75% of people completing talking therapies treatment waited less than six weeks for their first appointment, and 95% waited less than 18 weeks, and the target that at least 50% of people who complete treatment should move to recovery.

The Department also publishes a range of public health profiles at the following link:

https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/

These contain information on population health. The indicators in these profiles are presented at national, regional, and local levels. The presentation on the Fingertips platform supports the ability to track trends over time, to monitor inequalities in health outcomes for different population subgroups, and supports local benchmarking of performance. Data is organised into themed profiles. There are three on mental health, including suicide prevention, and a larger number on various aspects of physical health.

But the Government recognises we need to go further. That is why, in our new Mental Health Strategy call for evidence, we have explicitly asked for examples of how data could be used more innovatively to improve mental health and wider societal outcomes. The call for evidence closes on 10 July.

We have also commissioned an Independent Review into the prevalence and support for mental health conditions, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and autism, the final recommendations from which will shed further light on how we can better measure progress in improving mental health outcomes.