Mental Health: Out-of-Area Placements — House of Commons, 2015-12-03
Topic: Health
Alistair James Hendrie Burt (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s comment about his trust. My understanding is that the taskforce’s report will come through very shortly. I am not sure whether it will be done this month or by the start of next month, but it is imminent I appreciated the right hon. Gentleman’s kind remarks about the Secretary of State for Health. The Secretary of State has already agreed an action plan to tackle out-of-area treatments for adult acute in-patient care. Where out-of-area treatments are a problem, local areas will be asked to put in place clear action plans demonstrating how they can reduce out-of-area treatments, in the best interests of patients, during the course of 2016-17. Now I come to one of the right hon. Gentleman’s challenges. Building on this, I intend to go further and put in place a national ambition to address out-of-area treatments. I will do this in consideration of the Crisp commission and the taskforce report, and I will communicate details of this ambition by the end of March 2016—that is, by the start of the next financial year I want to wait and see what Lord Crisp and the Mental Health Taskforce say and then consider exactly what the ambition should be. Should it be an ambition for complete elimination? Should it provide a much tighter variation? I want to see those reports before I set the ambition, but I will set it, and the targets, and come back to the right hon. Gentleman and the House before the end of March next year to communicate those decisions. I hope that helps I also commend the right hon. Gentleman for recognising the need to improve mental health crisis care and for launching the mental health crisis care concordat, which we have discussed today. This debate has given us an opportunity to talk about variation in practice, the quality of street triage and the fact that we can do different things in different areas. I saw the work being done in Bradford, for example, where the mental health practitioner is located in the control room, as opposed to being on the street. The galvanising of local groups to work together by giving them the responsibility of doing the job has been absolutely vital. The way in which we are reducing the number of people detained in police cells is a clear example of how that process is working The Government are equally committed to reducing out-of-area mental health treatment for children and young people. In-patient child and adolescent mental health services—CAMHS—admission is a relative rare event. At any one time, however, there are approximately 1,300 children and young people from England in CAMHS in-patient services. Services themselves are usually subdivided into different specialties, such as eating disorder units or low secure units. That means that it is highly challenging to provide complex care in all areas, and on occasion, some children and young people may need to be referred for specialist treatment at a distance from their home, if that is in the best interests of their care. However, we are committed to ensuring that that is as rare an event as possible, and much progress has already been made.