What assessment has the Minister made of the number of children receiving their first child and adolescent mental health services appointments within four weeks?
Improving access to CAMHS services and recovering performance following the pandemic is a key priority for me. We provided around £20million in 2022-23 to support health boards to improve priority areas, including CAMHS. This is additional to the Welsh Government’s annual funding of over £760m provided to local health boards for all age mental health services.
Due to the variance in performance in accessing CAMHS support across health boards, we commissioned the NHS Delivery Unit to undertake a detailed review of CAMHS to support health boards to make improvements. Health boards have also developed improvement trajectories with the NHS Delivery Unit and these are being closely monitored on a monthly basis.
Mental health performance data can be accessed on stats Wales: Mental health (gov.wales). Latest published performance data, as at the end of September 2022, shows that at an all-Wales level 91.2% of children and young people are currently waiting less than 4 weeks for a first appointment for specialist CAMHS. Performance for Powys Teaching Health Board is 100%.