Children needing mental health care services face ‘postcode lottery’

Some children needing mental health services are forced to wait up to 18 months for treatment while four in 10 psychiatric services for young people are failing, a new report shows.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC), who commissioned the report, said that in one case young people were forced to wait as long as 493 days for treatment and 610 days for family therapy.

Elsewhere, services were setting their own targets for how quickly children should be seen, the CQC found, which varied greatly depending on a ‘postcode lottery’.

The research found that crisis care for suicidal young people or those with severe mental health problems was sometimes available only between 9am and 5pm, with night-time care provided by adult psychiatrists who lacked expertise in children’s mental health.

The research examined over 100 CQC reports of specialist child and teenage mental health services, rating 39 per cent as requiring improvement and two per cent as inadequate when it came to treating children quickly enough.

Children and young people are ‘repeatedly referred to different parts of the system after several services tell them they fail to meet the threshold for support’, the report said.

Charities and local authorities said the findings showed the urgency of the need for a new mental health service. The Local Government Association said the report revealed the ‘fragmentation, complexity and variation of a service that investment alone cannot solve’.

Dr Paul Lelliott, lead for mental health at the CQC, said: “We must also address those times when a child or young person feels let down or not listened to and make sure the same level of support is available to each and every one of them.”

Claire Murdoch, NHS England’s mental health director, said: “Without a doubt, after years of drought, the NHS’s mental health funding taps have now been turned on. NHS England has also been explicit about the scale of unmet need, which recent improvements have inevitably only been able to begin to tackle.

“It’s going to take years of concerted practical effort to solve these service gaps – even with new money – given the time it inescapably takes to train the extra child psychiatrists, therapists and nurses required.”

Barbara Keeley, shadow mental health minister, said: “Labour will continue to call on the Tory government to invest in and ringfence mental health budgets as Labour pledged at the general election, so that money reaches the underfunded services on the front line.”

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “Our commitment to improving children’s mental healthcare is shown by our additional £1.4 billion investment, more trained staff and more children and young people accessing care. But there is more to do, which is why we commissioned this review and will publish a green paper on children and young people’s mental health by the end of the year.”