Children V. NHS

The children’s commissioner Anne Longfield has published an open letter to Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, accusing him of ignoring young people’s experiences of the service and the frustrations of their parents. Laying out a list of grievances against him and his team, she also threatens to use the law to compel him to hand over data on waiting times for children’s mental health services.  The report, published to coincide with World Mental Health Day last week, estimated that only between a quarter and a fifth of children with mental health conditions received help last year. It stated: “Progress in improving children’s mental health services has been unacceptably slow.” Longfield had warned that provision for young people was a postcode lottery and said that “children’s inability to access mental health support” was leading to a range of extra problems, “from school exclusions to care placements breaking down to children ending up in the youth justice system”. “The briefing was prepared using the NHS’s own data,” Longfield writes. Longfield’s report made difficult reading for the government at a time when concerns over the health service have reached a critical level.

Stevens rubbished many of the claims in her recent report into children’s mental health.  He said that a key finding of the report, that “the government’s much-vaunted prioritisation of mental health has yet to translate into change at a local level”, was “demonstrably factually inaccurate”. Stevens writes: “I’m afraid we stand by our view that your report did indeed in places give a misleading view of NHS care.” Stevens criticised that the report contained “basic errors.” Stevens had indicated that NHSE was in possession of data that could be used to refute many of Longfield’s claims. 

 Longfield, however, tells Stevens: “Not once did you address the central issues raised. Instead, you and your team sought to undermine the important evidence that we are putting forward and strangely ignore the reality of children’s experiences of the service and the frustrations of their parents.” Longfield suggested that Stevens’s claims that she and her team had not bothered to check the report were “untrue”. Similarly, claims that NHSE had not been given adequate time to review the report before commenting were also without foundation, according to Longfield. “I am under no duty or obligation to share my work in advance, yet we did so, out of courtesy. If the NHS has data not in the public domain that disputes the picture we painted, then in the interests of transparency and accountability NHSE should publish it.”