Longfield and NHS chief clash over children's mental health

On Thursday (12 October) children's commissioner Anne Longfield sent an open letter to NHS England boss Simon Stevens accusing him and his organisation of seeking to "denigrate" a briefing on child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) that her office had sent to MPs.

The briefing said the NHS was failing to deliver improvements to CAMHS at local level and claimed that the state of child mental health provision was "shockingly poor".

In her letter Longfield told Stevens: "I am very disappointed by NHS England's response to our report, and your own personal response in front of the commons health select committee was to attempt to denigrate the research.

"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."

Longfield added that she remains of the view that CAMHS is "worryingly poor" and demanded that if NHS England has data that shows her office's briefing was incorrect that it makes this information publicly available.

The following day Stevens responded with a letter of his own.

"I'm afraid we stand by our view that your report did indeed in places give a misleading view of NHS care," he wrote.

"In particular your report asserts as a ‘key finding' that ‘the government's much vaunted prioritisation of mental [health] has yet to translate into change at local level.' We respectfully submit that that opinion is demonstrably factually inaccurate."

He said NHS spending on CAMHS rose by £100m last year - "far faster than overall NHS funding growth" - and this had led to the funding of four mother and baby units, 70 community eating disorders services and additional child and adolescent beds.

"To claim as your report does that all this somehow does not count as ‘change at the local level' therefore seems hard to justify," he wrote.

Stevens also criticised Longfield for not giving NHS England a chance to comment on the briefing's final draft before it was sent to journalists, an accusation denied by the children's commissioner in her letter.

Concluding his letter, Stevens said: "Our publicly stated assessment continues to be that - given the time it takes to train the extra child psychiatrists, therapists and other clinicians we will need - even if the mental health taskforce is implemented in full and further government funding becomes available there will still be unmet need for CAMHS by 2020/21.

"So we agree with you about the importance of the upcoming green paper and action subsequent to it."