Eating disorders are serious mental health problems. They can have severe psychological, physical and social consequences.

It is vital that children and young people (CYP) with eating disorders and their families can access effective help quickly. Offering evidence-based, high-quality care and support as soon as possible can improve recovery rates, lead to fewer relapses and reduce the need for inpatient admissions.

The Eating Disorders Programme promotes early access to effective, evidence-based and outcome-focused intervention working in partnership with children, young people and their families, and their wider system of support such schools, GPs, CYP community mental health services and paediatrics.

Updated Commissioning guidance, co-produced with clinical experts and those with lived experience, aims to ensure eating disorder provision best meets the needs of children, young people, their families.

The revised commissioning guidance addresses the demand and resourcing issues that services have been experiencing since the pandemic by enhancing eating disorder pathways, including through:

• Advice on upskilling CYP community mental health teams to provide ‘shared-care’ support to CYP identified as experiencing possible problems with eating; and to intervene earlier before CYP develop an eating disorder, and thus divert demand away from CEDs, whilst seeking to ensure that those CYP with ED are able to access CEDS more swiftly
• Guidance on building capacity in specialist community Eating Disorder teams to act as ‘pathway leaders’ to provide training, education and supervision to the rest of the pathway e.g. supporting primary care, enhanced outreach and supports to schools and VCSEs to improve early identification and prevention of eating disorders and early intervention for CYP with possible problems with eating.

The commissioning guidance is accompanied by updated technical guidance which sets out the detailed recording and reporting requirements for local systems in respect of the CYP ED Access and Waiting Time Standard, performance against which is monitored via the Mental Health Services Data Set.

To support Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and providers of eating disorder services to design and deliver collaborative, integrated services that support all children, young people, and their families and/or carers, a suite of supplementary resources are available on the Futures collaboration platform.

For more information on where to access help please see the NHS.uk eating disorders web page for all age groups.