"How are CAMHS waiting times going to come down?", Anna Dixon asks Health Department Director

Anna Dixon MP for Shipley constituency, today raised the critical issue of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service waiting times at a session held by the Public Accounts Committee.

Ms Dixon, who became a committee member in October, raised the subject at the evidence session on support for children and young people with special educational needs after constituents had highlighted the severity of the problem to her.

Speaking to Jonathan Marron, the Director General of Primary Care and Prevention at the Department for Health and Social Care, Anna Dixon MP said: “In Bradford district, there are 7000 children on CAMHS waiting lists - be specific about CAMHS, some are waiting up to four years for an assessment for ADHD and ASD, and anecdotally there are some areas where we’re talking eight years for a child.

“So when you’re talking more generally about, you know, Community Health Services, can you be more specific about how those CAMHS waiting times are going to come down, and come down sooner than 10 years?

Jonathan Marron replied: “I think we clearly have very significant waiting for CAMHS across the country, I think in the last three-month period, 130,000 children were seen for the first time.

“Of those seen, the median wait is 20 days, so the high-priority children are being pushed through.

“There are another 300,000 waiting, still on that list at the end of that period, where much, much longer median waiting times amongst all children.

“So we have a very significant problem, in making sure that our children and young people get access to services.

“Now we have been investing in CAHMS, I think I said at the beginning, you know, the mental health spend over this period is up from £11 to £17 billion, 40% increase in staff, we’ve been working on trying to put more mental health services into schools.

“So, I think we now have nearly 500 mental health, school-based, mental health teams covering about 40% of the school population.

“Obviously, the government’s got a commitment to take that to all children, so I think we’ve been trying to find both ways of boosting our existing services and to find new ways of finding new services that might help children earlier on.

“And then, I think, as I said earlier, that look, some of these services are really very challenged, and we’re looking again at just what our model is, I think ADHD being one where actually we’ve got a task force looking at that cause we’re not really sure what the right answer is.”