Health and Social Care Select Committee launches inquiry into community mental health services

The Health and Social Care Select Committee has announced the launch of an inquiry into community mental health services.

The inquiry will examine what good looks like from the perspective of service users and their families/carers. The Committee would like the inquiry to shine a light on case studies of innovative practice and high-quality care across the country, and to undertake meaningful and impactful engagement with people accessing these services. You can view the call for evidence here which closes on 4 February.

The inquiry will consider how service users’ wider health and social needs can be addressed, including in employment and housing, and to understand what policy interventions are required to improve how these needs are met. The inquiry will also scrutinise the implementation and effectiveness since 2019 of the Community Mental Health Framework, which was intended to move away “from siloed, hard-to-reach services towards joined-up care and whole population approaches”.

Issues over access to mental health services were highlighted in Lord Darzi’s report into the state of the NHS in England, which found that for people needing to access mental health services, “long waits have become normalised”. Darzi found that there were around 1 million people waiting to access mental health services by April 2024, including 345,000 referrals where people were waiting more than a year for first contact.

This inquiry is focusing on adults with severe mental health needs in particular (including those patients transitioning to adult services), which includes but is not limited to people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and severe depression. The Committee recognises the scale of the challenge in children and young people’s mental health, and plans to do further work in this area in due course, building on its predecessor Committee’s 2021 inquiry.