NHS mental health dashboard

The NHS Mental Health Dashboard (formerly the Mental Health Five Year Forward View Dashboard) brings together key data from across mental health services to measure the performance of the NHS in delivering our Long Term Plan for mental health.

The NHS Long Term Plan is expanding capacity and improving the quality of effective mental health services and is tackling a treatment gap, that is all the more important to address in the context of the pandemic and increased prevalence.

This dashboard provides transparency in assessing how NHS mental health services are performing, alongside technical details explaining how mental health services are funded and delivered.

The most recent version of the dashboard includes the latest data available up to and including Quarter 1 of the 2023/24 financial year.

Mental health services funding and investment

The NHS’s Long Term Plan reaffirms the NHS’s commitment to putting mental health care on a level footing with physical health services.

Since 2015/16, NHS in England has met its commitment that the increase in local funding for mental health (excluding learning disabilities and dementia) is at least in line with the overall increase in the money available to integrated care boards (ICBs). This is called the Mental Health Investment Standard (MHIS).  From 2019/20 onwards, as part of the NHS Long Term Plan, the NHS has made a renewed commitment that funding for mental health services will grow faster than the overall NHS budget, creating a new ringfenced local investment fund worth at least £2.3 billion a year by 2023/24. The MHIS also includes a further commitment that local funding for mental health will grow by an additional percentage increment to reflect additional mental health funding being made available to ICBs (previously CCGs).

  • The Q1 dashboard includes 2023/24 planned spend, based on the planning submissions as at 16 May 2023. This is based on ICB geographies.
  • Finance data is only updated for the Q1 and Q4 dashboard. The dashboard now shows the finance position based on planned spend as at Q1 2023/24. All ICBs are planning to meet the MHIS target and nationally plans exceed the MHIS by circa £20m (0.2%). Further, Specialised Commissioning are planning to spend £2.4bn, which is a small increase on 2022/23 outturn.
  • Spend on learning disability, autism and dementia is not included in the MHIS or in the LTP commitment to increase mental health spending by £2.3bn a year by 2023/24.
  • 2023/24 total planned spend on learning disability, autism and dementia, is £3.30bn. In 2022/23 actual spend on learning disability, autism and dementia, was £3.28bn
  • Overall, there is an expected further increase in proportion of spend at ICB on mental health (including include learning disability, autism and dementia) against base allocation, to 14.2% in 2023/24 from 14.0% in 2022/23, and 13.8% in 2021/22.
  • Spending across mental health services (Specialised Commissioning and ICB combined, including learning disability, autism and dementia) has increased each financial year to £16.81bn in 2023/24 (planned spend) from £12.51bn (actual spend) in 2018/19.
  • The commitment at national level that spending on children and young people’s mental health services will increase faster than overall spending on mental health continues to be met but is not reported as a metric in the dashboard.

Finance context

  • The finance data will remain unchanged until outturn spend is published in the Q4 2023/24 dashboard. For calculation of achievement of the MHIS, spend against additional in-year allocations is excluded.
  • The way allocations are calculated has been changed, so the calculations from 2021/22 onwards are not directly comparable to the MH share of spend on earlier dashboards.

Mental Health Investment Standard Review

  • No Mental Health Investment Standard Review was undertaken in 2020/21, this was due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Independent reviews were reinstated for 2021/22 onwards and based on CCGs spend relating to 2021/22 and ICBs from 2022/23.

Mental health support

By 2023/24, investment in the Long Term Plan will deliver timely, high quality mental health support, including:

  • Continued investment to expand specialist community perinatal mental health services so that 66,000 new and expectant mothers with moderate to severe or complex perinatal mental health needs access evidenced based care closer to home when they need it.
  • Expanding services to ensure that at least an additional 345,000 children and young people aged 0-24 will be able to access support via NHS funded mental health services and school or college-based Mental Health Support Teams.
  • All children and young people experiencing a mental health crisis will be able to access crisis care 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with a single point of access including through NHS 111.
  • The NHS will provide a single-point of access and timely, age-appropriate, universal mental health crisis care for everyone, accessible via NHS 111.
  • 370,000 people with severe mental illnesses will access better quality care across integrated primary and community mental health teams, have greater choice and control over the care they receive, and be supported to lead fulfilling lives in their communities.

Evaluating progress

From April 2023, national level data in in the dashboard has returned to actual numbers reported by providers, and estimated data due to the cyber incident in August 2022 is no longer used, other than historical figures included in the calculations for rolling 12-month metrics.

The dashboard allows NHS England to track the delivery of its national ambitions for mental health. Great progress has been made since the publication of the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health and the Long Term Plan. Despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health services have remained open and continued to deliver against our commitments set out in the Long Term Plan:

  • In 2018, fewer than 50% of adult crisis teams were 24/7, open access or had home treatment teams staffed to offer a genuine alternative to admission. There has been significant progress since that time, with all teams now operating an open access model via all age urgent MH helplines with plans on track to enable the full national switchover of NHS 111 ‘select MH option’ by April 2024.
  • For the first time, based on national liaison survey results for 2022, all emergency department sites are now offering access to a liaison service or access to local crisis support (via in-reach) on a 24/7 basis, with 92% of these services being provided by on-site liaison service. This is up from 66% in the 2018 survey, and 39% in 2016.
  • The following Children and Young People (CYP) Outcomes metrics have been added to the dashboard for the first time this quarter, following their inclusion in monthly Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS) statistics (from April 2023 data):
    • Number of closed CYP referrals (0-17) with at least 2 contacts and any perspective paired score
    • Percentage of closed CYP referrals (0-17) with at least 2 contacts and any perspective paired score
    • Number CYP under 18 referrals with at least 2 contacts & self-rated paired score showing measurable improvement
    • Percentage of CYP under 18 referrals with at least 2 contacts & self-rated paired score showing measurable improvement
  • The following Urgent & Emergency Care mental health Waiting Time Standards metrics have been added to the dashboard for the first time this quarter, following their inclusion in the monthly MHSDS statistics (from April 2023 data):
    • Percentage of referrals to community crisis services with face-to-face contact within 4 hours (very urgent)
    • Percentage of referrals to community crisis services with face-to-face contact within 24 hours (urgent)
    • Percentage of referrals to liaison psychiatry service, ED referral source, with face-to-face contact within 1 hour
  • In April 2021 a new headline metric was introduced to monitor how many under 18s receive at least one contact from an NHS funded service to monitor the NHS Long Term Plan children and young people’s mental health access ambition that an additional 345,000 children and young people aged 0-24 will have access to support via NHS funded services and school or college-based Mental Health Support Teams by 2023/24. The number of under 18s receiving at least one contact in Q1 2023/24 was 702,280 (rolling 12-month data as at the end of Q1) which is a modest increase on the previous year (691,935 in Q1 2022/23), but an increase of c.35% since the start of the Long Term Plan (from 513,964). Data for young adults (18-24-year-olds) is monitored separately; at the end of Q1 2023/24 (rolling 12-month total), 221,236 young adults aged 18-24 received at least one contact from NHS-funded services (excluding NHS Talking Therapies).
  • Since the pandemic there has been a sustained increase in demand for treatment for children and young people’s eating disorder services which has impacted on the system’s ability to meet the CYP Eating Disorder Standard. From Q1 2023/24, performance for CYP eating disorder services is reported using data from the MHSDS, following the retirement of the bespoke SDCS collection at the end of March 2023.  This means that the data from Q1 2023/24 is not directly comparable to previous years.  In Q1 2023/24, an estimated total of 2,420 CYP started both urgent and routine/non-urgent treatment. In Q1 of 2023/24 60.8% (219 out of 360) of children and young people with an eating disorder started urgent treatment within one week. For non-urgent cases 66.7% (1,374 out of 2,060) started treatment within four weeks. Both remain below the national standard of 95% and it is too early to comment on what this might mean for future performance.
  • Since April 2019, there has been a specialist community perinatal mental health (PMH) service in every integrated care system (ICS) area of England. In Q1 2023/24, access to specialist perinatal mental health services decreased to 51,448 women and birthing people but this is an increase compared to 45,411 in Q1 2022/23. However, access is below the planned growth trajectory for access to reach 66,000 by Q4 2022/23. Services are being supported to recover this trajectory as soon as possible. From Q3 2021/22, PMH data included access figures from Maternal Mental Health Services (MMHS).
  • Access to NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression (formerly IAPT), has declined in Q1 2023/24 to 307,254 (67% of the LTP trajectory) from 320,228 in Q4 2022/23 (71% of trajectory) with 90.0% of those starting treatment in less than six weeks. Recovery has improved from 50.4% in Q4 22/23 to 50.7% in Q1 23/24.
  • In Q4 2022/23, 76% of the country has coverage of the four key components of a comprehensive children and young people’s crisis service. This is slightly below the target of 79% public commitment for 2022/23, however we remain on track to achieve 100% coverage by the end of 2023/24.

Progress against other ambitions and delivery of mental health programmes that are measured outside of the Dashboard are published elsewhere.

NHS Mental Health Dashboard