The children’s commissioner has launched a savage attack on the head of the NHS, accusing him of denigrating research that shows an “unacceptable” lack of children’s mental health provision.
In a highly unusual move, 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.
Longfield made the decision to go public with her complaints – published on the commissioner’s website – after Stevens rubbished many of the claims in her recent report into children’s mental health, an issue she identified as her top priority after consulting with children.
“Many told me about their desperate attempts, sometimes lasting years, to access support, and even primary school children raised concerns about anxiety,” Longfield told Stevens in the letter. 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.”
Article from the Guardian, 15 October 2017