Meeting mental health targets will be ‘significant challenge’, NAO warns

The National Audit Office (NAO) has said that meeting targets for mental health standards will be a ‘signifiant challenge’ for the NHS.

The spending watchdog acknowledges that the Department of Health (DoH) and NHS England are ‘starting to make progress’ with the actions needed to implement access and waiting times standards for people with mental health conditions, bur warns that ‘much remains to be done’.

According to the NOA, meeting standards for access to mental health services is dependant on action by many local organisations, but the full cost of implementing these standards and longer ambitions ‘is not well understood’.

The NAO has said that full information does not exist to measure how far the NHS is from meeting its targets for access and waiting time standards, and suggests that the greatest challenges moving forward will be ‘collecting data to show whether the standards are being met, building the mental health workforce and reinforcing incentives for providers’.

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said: “The Department of Health has recognised that mental health has been treated as a poor relation relative to other health needs for many years. This recognition, the goal of ‘parity of esteem’ and the setting of new standards for access and waiting times are all bold and impressive steps forward. It is important that these steps are supported by implementation in a reasonable timescale if they are not to be a cause for disillusionment, and this looks challenging in current conditions.”