Lord Oates – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Oates on 2015-11-18.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they plan to take to ensure equality of treatment for mental and physical illness.

Lord Prior of Brampton

We have put into legislation through the Health and Social Care Act 2012 that mental health should have equal priority to physical health. We have also committed NHS England through the NHS Mandate to achieve parity of esteem between mental and physical health.

We are implementing the first waiting times targets for mental health services to ensure more people have timely access to care in the same way they do for treatment for physical health. We have also increased access to talking therapies through the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme.