Tag: Luciana Berger

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-03-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps he is taking to ensure that psychological therapies are available to deaf people.

Alistair Burt

It is the responsibility of local providers and commissioners to make the reasonable adjustments required by the Equality Act 2010 to ensure that disabled people are not placed at a substantial disadvantage compared to non-disabled people.

In order to reduce unacceptable variation in the provision of accessible information and communication support to disabled people, including adult sign readers, NHS England published a statutory accessible information standard. The standard sets out that all organisations providing NHS services must take steps to ensure that people receive information that they can access and understand, and receive communication support if they need it. Organisations must comply in full with the standard by 31 July 2016. Many local authorities provide interpreters within talking therapy settings.

There is ongoing activity by NHS England and the Department to encourage access to Improving Access to Psychological Therapy (IAPT) services by the under-represented groups. Over the last spending review we invested over £400 million into the IAPT programme to ensure access to talking therapies for those who need them. The Prime Minister recently announced £1 billion to start a revolution in mental health. NHS England’s Mental Health Taskforce reported in February 2016, setting out transformative plans using that additional funding, including for IAPT.

Additional funding will enable NHS England to put in place a five year plan to improve IAPT services across the country, increasing access to evidence-based psychological therapies to reach 25% of need, and helping 600,000 more people to access care each year by 2020 with a focus on people living with long-term physical health conditions.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-03-03.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many people of each (a) gender and (b) ethnicity were sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1983 in each of the last five years.

Alistair Burt

The information requested is not available between 2010/11 and 2013/14 as comparable data was not collected during these years due to changes in the way the data was categorised and collected and variations in the number of organisations which reported in some years. Data for 2014/15 are provided in the table below.

Number of detentions and short term orders under the Mental Health Act 1983 by gender and ethnic group: 2014/15

	Detentions	Short-term orders
Detentions and Orders	41,592	19,648
Male	22,016	10,651
Female	19,566	8,989
White	30,322	14,954
Mixed	938	444
Asian or Asian British	2,714	924
Black or Black British	4,368	1,438
Other Ethnic Groups	1,219	531

Source: Mental Health Minimum Data Set/Mental Health & Learning Disabilities Data Set 2014/15

Notes:

1. The numbers in this table represent the number of uses of the Mental Health Act 1983, not the number of individuals who were subject to the Act.
2. Mental Health Minimum Data Set (MHMDS) is not the official data source for statistics about uses of the Mental Health Act 1983 but it is the only one that provides national information about gender and ethnic group. The MHMDS are known to under represent uses of the Mental Health Act 1983.
3. The data source for official statistics about uses of the Mental Health Act 1983 is the KP90 collection, with figures published in the annual statistical release: Inpatients Formally Detained in Hospitals Under the Mental Health Act 1983 and Patients Subject to Supervised Community Treatment, England. Therefore, the data in the table may differ from data in the official published statistics.
4. Counts by ethnicity and gender may not sum exactly to the overall total because for some people this information was invalid or not recorded.
5. Detentions includes: detentions under Part ll, detentions under Part lll, detentions under previous legislation (Fifth Schedule) and other Acts, detentions subsequent to admission, detentions following use of a Place of Safety Order and detentions following revocation of a Community Treatment Order.
6. Short-term orders are defined as those of no greater than 72 hours’ duration and involving uses of sections 4 and 5 and sections 135 and 136.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-03-15.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of long-term funding arrangements for the transformation of inpatient care for people with learning disabilities to community care settings.

Alistair Burt

In the national service model and Building the right support published in October 2015 NHS England, the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services set out how areas would be supported to deliver lasting change to people with a learning disability and/or autism who display behaviour that challenges.

To develop community capacity, clinical commissioning groups (CCGs), local authorities and NHS England’s specialised commissioners have formed 48 transforming care partnerships (TCPs) to plan for the future. TCPs have been asked to use the total sum of money they spend as a whole system on people with a learning disability and/or autism to deliver care in a different way to achieve better results. This includes shifting money from some services (such as inpatient care) into others (such as community health services including mental health services or individual packages of support). The costs of the future model of care will therefore be met from the total current envelope of spend on health and social care services for people with a learning disability and/or autism.

During a phase of transition, commissioners will need to invest in new community support before closing inpatient provision. To support them to do this NHS England will make available up to £30 million of transformation funding over three years, to be matched by CCGs, and £15 million in capital funding. This funding is in addition to the £10 million made available to six fast track areas in 2015/16.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-03-23.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 22 January 2016 to Question 30262, what plans Health Education England has to reform funding not related to the bursary scheme for postgraduate training in (a) child psychotherapy, (b) clinical psychology and (c) improving access to psychological therapies from 2017.

Ben Gummer

Health Education England (HEE) funding for psychological therapy training is currently determined at a local level based on local need. For 2016-17 HEE will fund those commissions set out in the HEE Commissioning and Investment Plan 2016/17 which was published in December 2015.

The delivery and funding options for healthcare training programmes, such as these, that fall outside the healthcare education funding reform announced in the November 2015 Spending Review may need further consideration as we seek to align systems and ensure that the future supply of qualified healthcare professionals continues to meet the needs of the health service. The Government is working with HEE and other delivery organisations to this end.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-03-24.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, pursuant to the Answer of 18 January 2016 to Question 22159, on mental illness and A&E departments, if he will publish that data for each month of 2015 and 2016.

Alistair Burt

There are no plans to routinely publish the number of accident and emergency attendances with a duration to departure of more than four hours, for patients with a primary diagnosis of psychosis, by age group.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-04-18.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what progress has been made on improving women’s mental health since the publication in 2010 of Working towards women’s wellbeing: unfinished business.

Alistair Burt

The Department’s mental health policy teams provide strategic policy advice on mental health for people of all ages and genders. When issues are specific to a gender these are addressed within the policy development.

The Coalition Government published a national mental health strategy No Health Without Mental Health in 2012 which addressed mental health issues for the whole population, and introduced the concept of parity of esteem for mental health. This Government continues to hold NHS England to account through the NHS Mandate for the achievement of measurable progress towards the parity of esteem for mental health.

The Government announced almost £1 billion of additional investment for mental health in January 2016 including £290 million of new investment over the next five years to provide mental healthcare for new mothers. The Mental Health Taskforce Report published in February 2016 set out a recommendation for NHS England to ensure that by 2020/21 at least 30,000 more women each year access evidence-based specialist mental health care during the perinatal period. The recommendation stated this should include access to psychological therapies and the right range of specialist community or inpatient care so that comprehensive, high-quality services are in place across England.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-04-19.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to ensure suicide prevention services are autism-appropriate.

Alistair Burt

The information requested is not collected centrally.

Public Health England (PHE) published ‘Guidance for developing a local suicide prevention action plan’ in 2014. The guidance states the importance of developing multi-agency suicide prevention groups to ensure that local suicide prevention plans are informed by local intelligence and the needs of the local community. PHE is currently refreshing this guidance.

We welcomed the independent Mental Health Taskforce recommendation to ensure that all local areas have multi-agency suicide prevention plans in place by 2017.

The National Suicide Prevention Strategy (2012) stated that accessible, high-quality mental health services are fundamental to reducing the risk of suicide in people of all ages with mental health problems.

Last year, NHS England commissioned the world’s first Learning Disability Mortality Review Programme to support local areas to review deaths of people with learning disabilities and to use the information to improve service provision so that physical and mental health problems can be identified and addressed. The process is currently being piloted in the North East and Cumbria.

We have made monumental strides in the way we help manage conditions such as autism in this country and that is why we are working alongside people with autism, and their carers,

to make sure they have access to healthcare with adjustments made for their conditions. This is a focus of the Cross Government Autism Strategy which was revised in 2014 as Think Autism.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-04-29.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what consultations he plans to undertake on the levels of bursaries and salary support for trainee clinical psychologists in the 2017-18 cohort.

Ben Gummer

Health Education England (HEE) funding for trainees in clinical psychology is currently determined at a local level based on local need and is subject to annual workforce planning. For 2016-17, HEE will fund those commissions set out in the HEE Commissioning and Investment Plan for 2016-17. HEE’s plans for training clinical psychologists remain unchanged from 2015-16 with 526 commissions proposed for 2016-17. HEE will set out its plans for 2017-18 training commissions in its next annual Commissioning and Investment Plan or Workforce Plan for England which is expected to be published in December 2016 prior to the start of the financial year.

The Government is currently consulting on how the education and funding reforms for pre-registration undergraduate and postgraduate non-medical courses (nursing, midwifery and allied health courses) which are currently funded through both HEE funded tuition and an NHS bursary/reduced rate loan for maintenance are most successfully implemented. Respondents to the consultation may wish to raise issues relating to the funding for courses operating outside of this model, such as clinical psychology training programmes. The Government will consider these in the context of its consultation response.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-05-18.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether there is a team within his Department with specific responsibility for children and young people’s mental health.

Alistair Burt

Yes, there is a team within the Department with specific responsibility for those areas of policy on children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing for which the Secretary of State for Health is accountable.

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-06-13.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what information his Department holds on which organisations have offered mental health support to veterans in (a) England, (b) Merseyside and (c) Liverpool in each year since 2010.

Mark Lancaster

In the UK, primary responsibility for the provision of healthcare, including mental healthcare, for veterans rests with the NHS in England and the Devolved Administrations. Funding of mental healthcare for veterans is a matter for the NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups in England and their equivalents in the Devolved Administrations. These bodies will hold information on the organisations providing mental healthcare to veterans in the UK.

The Ministry of Defence provides advice, information and signposting to support services for veterans though its Veterans UK web pages and free telephone helpline service and we encourage veterans wishing to seek help with mental health problems to visit: www.gov.uk/mental-health-support-for-the-uk-armed-forces or call the 24-hour veterans’ mental health helpline on 0800 138 1619.