Question reference: S6W-25598
- Asked by: Maurice Golden, MSP for North East Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 19 February 2024
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Current status: Answered by Maree Todd on 4 March 2024
Question
To ask the Scottish Government how much has been invested in clearing any long waiting times for child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), and how any such targeted support has affected waiting times, in each NHS board in each of the last three years.
Answer
The NHS Recovery Plan 2021-2026 refers to the support for CAMHS included in the £120m Mental Health Recovery and Renewal Fund. In total, £34m of the Fund was invested in 2021/22 to improve access to and quality of CAMHS services.
This fund was superseded in 2022-23 by the Mental Health Outcomes Framework, which bundled funding to Boards for improvements to CAMHS, psychological therapies, eating disorder care, primary care and children and young people’s neurodevelopmental services, as well as ongoing innovation and service reform.
The intention behind bundling was to allow Boards flexibility to align spending to local priorities, based on this it is not possible to separate out the specific CAMHS funding provided to each Board from 2022-23 onwards. We have allocated £48.6 million of supplementary funding to Boards so far this year via the Mental Health Outcomes Framework. This is in addition to £36.7 million allocated to Health Boards via the Outcomes Framework in 2022-23; and to the total package of core funding that Health Boards receive.
So far 13 out of 14 CAMHS services have effectively eliminated their long wait lists (where 3% or fewer of all waits are over 1 year). Full data information on for each Board on CAMHS patients starting treatment is publicly available via Public Health Scotland: PHS CAMHS Waiting Times .