Imran Hussain – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Imran Hussain on 2016-10-07.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure consistency of provision in the quality of care in mental health services across England.
Nicola Blackwood
Mental health is one of the six core clinical areas to be covered by NHS England’s new CCG Improvement and Assessment Framework. NHS England is working to ensure that this will provide as broad a view as possible of how well commissioners are supporting and driving improvement in mental health.
A dashboard for mental health will be published this autumn, containing a set of standard indicators to articulate progress in mental health services at a national level and allow benchmarking of services across the country.
NHS England will continue to ensure that mental health is represented within the full suite of levers and incentives at its disposal including Commissioning for Quality and Innovation payment framework (CQUINs), Quality Premium, the NHS Standard Contract and within the design of new models of care. The Technical Guidance for NHS planning covering 2017/18 and 2018/19 that accompanied the publication of the main NHS Planning Guidance earlier this autumn included a number of draft proposals for specific mental health CQUINs:
– Improving services for people with Mental Health needs who present to A&E;
– Improving physical health care for people with Severe Mental Illnesses; and
– Improving transitions for children and young people.
The Quality Premium is based on measures that cover a combination of national and local priorities, and on delivery of the fundamentals of commissioning. The Premium is paid to clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) in 2018/19 and 2019/20 reflects the quality of the health services commissioned by them in 2017/18 and 2018/19. There will be six mandated indicators including a mental health indicator.
Mental health service providers are responsible for the consistency and quality in the services that they provide. Services in England are regulated by the Care Quality Commission which introduced a new regulation and inspection regime in 2014. CCGs are expected to increase their spending on mental health in line with overall growth in their baseline allocations.
