Mental Health Watch

The last few months have seen the government announcing considerable new investments to support efforts to tackle the backlog in elective surgeries.

While much has been said about the importance of helping the NHS recover from COVID-19, comparatively little attention has been paid to mental health, where services were hit by a double whammy of reduced capacity and a significant upsurge in demand. 

One of the core purposes of the College’s Mental Health Watch website is to summarise key data on mental health services in one, easy-to-use platform so that those at the frontline can easily understand how the system is doing and hold leaders to account for delivering the ambitions of the NHS Long Term Plan.

Following the most recent Mental Health Watch update last month, we published a special briefing which looks at key indicators to give us a better sense of system pressures and responses.

What does the data mean for a mental health sector dealing with a burgeoning backlog and the long tail of the pandemic?

Read the briefing, which discusses waiting times for children with eating disorders and self harm referrals to Children and Adolescent Services, among other things.

You can use the site’s interactive charts and graphs to see what the data says about care, finance, leadership and the workforce in your area.

Back to our December 2021 eNewsletter.