David Simpson – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by David Simpson on 2016-10-07.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department has taken to increase mental health support to UK students in the last 12 months.
Nicola Blackwood
The Department has responsibility for the health and wellbeing of people in England.
Over the last 12 months progress has been made on many of the key ambitions set out in Future in Mind, which sets out the five-year vision of major system-wide transformation to improve access to high-quality mental health support across England for all children and young people. Future in Mind acknowledged that in particular university students may experience difficulty in transitioning between adolescent and adult mental health services due to geographical relocation and transience of residence.
The core delivery mechanism in making this ambitious programme of transformation happen is the system-wide publicly available Local Transformation Plans (LTPs) that should cover the full spectrum of need for children and young people who have existing or emerging mental health problems. In developing the LTPs, local areas were asked to work with their key partners – including education – to agree locally how best to meet the mental health needs of children and young people in their local populations and this included effective transitions between services.
To support this transformation, an additional £1.4 billion funding has been made available over the course of this Parliament that will enable the expansion and extension of the Children and Young People’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme so that high quality and evidence-based interventions can be accessed wherever they live.
