Luciana Berger – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2015-10-13.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department has taken to prepare for the implementation of waiting time standards for eating disorder services in April 2016.

Alistair Burt

On 3 August 2015, NHS England and the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health published a commissioning guide for clinical commissioning groups that will set out how to prepare for the access and waiting time standard for Children and Young People with an Eating Disorder ready for implementation of the standard. The standard is that children and young people with eating disorders should be seen within four weeks or one week in urgent cases.

From January 2016, compliance with this standard will be monitored via the Health and Social Care Information Centre website based on the data collected through the Mental Health Services Data Set. This will provide a baseline for planning and implementation from 2017-2018, when the standard will come into force. From 2016, the data will be used to measure progress with a view to 95% of young people meeting the standard by 2020.