Luciana Berger – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2015-12-14.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department takes to compare the transformation plans of clinical commissioning groups when appraising those plans.
Alistair Burt
As part of improving transparency, all Local Transformation Plans must be published locally and made widely available.
NHS England’s guidance Local Transformation Plans for Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing – Guidance and support for local areas is explicit about the need to promote equality and address health inequalities, and states that plans should ‘address the full spectrum of need including children and young people who have particular vulnerability to mental health problems for e.g. those with learning disabilities, looked after children and care leavers, those at risk or in contact with the Youth Justice System, or who have been sexually abused and/or exploited’.
The assurance process requires local areas to evidence how they are meeting the needs of vulnerable groups including looked after children and children who have experienced abuse.
An analysis of Local Transformation Plans has been commissioned and will include a thematic review of how the mental health needs of children and young people in vulnerable groups have been addressed.
As set out in the guidance for Local Transformation Plans an integral part of the locally developed Children and Young People’s Mental Health Transformation Plans includes a tracking template that sets out local progress milestones and financial spend. This tracker will be used as the basis for assurance assessment in 2015/16 and from 2016/17 onwards progress on local transformation will become part of the mainstream planning assurance process.
Local Transformation Plansrequire all key partners in a local area to agree how best to meet the mental health needs of children and young people in their local populations. 122 Local Transformation Planshave been developed that cover all 209 clinical commissioning groups.
The assurance process for Local Transformation Plans for Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing was undertaken by NHS England regional teams and included assurance against each plan of standard self-assessment and tracker templates to enable a comparison of plans against objective success criteria.
NHS England have commissioned a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Local Transformation Plans, in order to support policy makers, local commissioners and services to understand and use the data that is contained within the plans to drive further improvements. Local Transformation Plans will be reviewed from a narrative, analytical and financial perspective, with thematic reviews carried out in key focus areas that align with Future in mind principles.
