Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people have been diagnosed with eating disorders in the last five years.

The following tables show the number of people referred to specialist secondary mental health services with a primary diagnosis of eating disorders from 2014/15 to 2015/16, and the number of people referred to specialist secondary mental health services with a primary reason for referral of eating disorders from 2016/17 to 2018/19.

Source: NHS Digital Mental Health and Learning Disabilities Data Set (MHLDDS)

Source: NHS Digital: Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS)

The MHSDS replaced the MHLDDS in January 2016. Methods of counting activity in mental health services are different between the two data sets. The changes in numbers reported therefore reflect changes in the data set. For example, the MHLDDS covered mental health services for adults only, but the MHSDS includes children’s and young peoples' mental health services.

There are two matters to consider when looking at the MHSDS data:

- Diagnosis recording is known to be low. Of the people in contact with these services on 31 October 2018, for example, a diagnosis was recorded for only 22.3% of people. Therefore, the number of people with a primary reason for referral of 'eating disorders' for 2016/17, 2017/18 and 2018/19 is provided, rather a count of people diagnosed with an eating disorder.

- There is a year-on-year increase in the number of providers submitting to the MHSDS, with 85 submitting data in April 2016, 108 in March 2018, and then 171 in March 2019. Therefore, the figures shown, including for 2018/19, are known to be incomplete at England level.