Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to tackle long hospital stays for patients with complex mental health needs as a result of insufficient community or rehabilitation services.

We are committed to ensuring that people receive timely access to high quality care in the least restrictive setting and as close to home as possible. To this end, NHS England is investing more than £400 million into community Crisis Resolution Home Treatment Teams for adults over four years from April 2017. £1.4 billion investment has been committed over five years to increase community and inpatient provision in children and young people’s mental health services.

NHS England is developing mental health care pathways and implementation guides, comprising a clear set of quality benchmarks covering both acute inpatient and community based settings from referral through to discharge for all ages.

A number of changes have been made to national data collections to reflect new policy developments. This will enable reliable monitoring of activity across the mental health system, including improved data on delayed transfers of care from mental health inpatient settings and on length of hospital stay. This will provide greater transparency at a national level and support improvements locally.