3. Will the Cabinet Secretary provide an update on waiting times for children and adolescent mental health services? OAQ51479

We have invested an additional £8 million a year to support a substantial programme of work to improve access to specialist CAMHS services in response to the significant increase in referrals in recent years. All local health boards are working towards consistently meeting the 28-day target.

Cabinet Secretary, there has been tremendous progress in the past 12 months in reducing the number of children and young people waiting for a CAMHS appointment. I welcome the work the Welsh Government has undertaken on this issue. As a result of the additional investment, we cut the numbers waiting for treatment by over two thirds. However, we still have over 500 children and young people waiting between four and 26 weeks, and a handful waiting longer than that. Cabinet Secretary, given that children and young people should be seen within 28 days, what more can your Government do to ensure that no young person has to wait up to half a year?

Thank you for the question. I welcome the fact that you've recognised the significant progress that has been made, but also I recognise there is still more to do. There was a significant amount of improvement to achieve the 28-day target across Wales in March this year. Since then, we've seen achievement slip back, and we now have some people waiting too long again. We've actually seen that the average wait is under eight weeks. Given that a couple of years ago people were regularly waiting more than six months, that's a significant step forward.

I've made clear to health boards, at chair and vice-chair level, that not only do I expect to face continued scrutiny, and rightly so, until we see significant improvement that is sustained, but also they can expect me to raise it in accountability fora with them until they not just achieve the target of 80 per cent of people being seen within 28 days, but actually that they can sustain that achievement as well. We've invested in the staff that they said that they would need, and we've injected an extra £300,000-worth of money to make sure that within this year we deal with that backlog that does exist. I fully expect that through the next year we will have much more regular and sustainable achievement to make sure that people don't wait too long, either for specialist CAMHS or to be referred to other parts of our health and care system if CAMHS is not the place to meet their health and care needs.

Cabinet Secretary, can I ask you what assurances you can give that the budget allocation for CAMHS will be ring-fenced? 

We've been very clear in investing the additional resource that was for CAMHS. We've got our broader mental health ring fence, and, actually, we know that we spend more than the ring fence both in mental health and in CAMHS services. Part of the challenge is about seeing CAMHS as part of a whole system, because we know that part of the challenge has been that there are more people being referred in, while we still have that significant challenge of inappropriate referral. So, as well as getting the investment right in CAMHS, which I believe we have done, we've also got the investment in other services where people do have very real health and care support needs. I'm confident that we've made the right investment and I'm confident that that money is being spent on CAMHS as it's intended, and I fully expect that we'll report back on improvement. If not, I will face your questions, and others, on why significant improvement has not been made and sustained.  

I've been raising the issue of CAMHS waiting lists for some time. Recently, the First Minister wrote to me explaining the reasons behind the changes in the way that these waiting lists were measured and published, explaining that some local health boards were wrongly including referrals of children and young people to local primary mental health support services in their specialist CAMHS data submissions, and local primary mental health support services also have a 28-day target for access to assessment and interventions, but this is reported and measured separately. However, this isn't quite accurate—it isn't possible to break down the published data for this service by age group. This means we have no idea how long children are waiting for these services. Do you have any plans to publish this data to allow greater scrutiny of this Government's performance in terms of child and adolescent mental health?

We expect to make available properly scrutinised and accurate data as official statistics, so that people can see transparently whether the health service is meeting the 80 per cent of children and young people being seen in CAMHS services within 28 days. I cannot be clearer about my expectations or about the transparency of the information that the public and Members will receive.