Following a request from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, this report presents statistics on the time between referral and second contact for children and young people accessing secondary mental health, learning disabilities and autism services in England, and by Region, Sub Integrated Care Board (Sub ICB), and Integrated Care Board (ICB) footprint areas. Please note that the methodology for 2022-23 differs from data produced for previous years. Included in this supplementary information are time between referral to second contact for children and young people accessing mental health services.
For this year, referrals which were active at any point in the year are considered, previously only referrals which started in the year were included. This means that data for 2022-23 is not comparable with previous iterations of this analysis. Data at sub national level is suppressed for values less than 5 and rounded to the nearest 5 otherwise.
We have also provided some analysis included in the Childs Commissioner Report showing the number of referrals diagnosed, the average waiting time (mean and median) between the referral request being received and the first diagnosis for ADHD or Autism and the average number of contacts (mean and median) between referral and diagnosis.
It should be noted that the quality of diagnosis recording in MHSDS is poor. Previous estimates suggest that only around 25% of people within the dataset have a diagnosis recorded. This can either be due to the difficulties in flowing SNOMED codes or due to the difficulties in providing an accurate diagnosis for some mental health conditions.