Health Minister David Ashford has pledged to publish data on waiting times for mental health appointments as soon as possible.

The House of Keys heard last week that at the moment there are no records on the length of time between an initial contact with a GP to first receiving treatment from a mental health specialist.

Bill Shimmins (Middle) demanded: ’Why is the length of time people are waiting for mental health support not being measured?

’When will this start to be measured and when will it be published?’

The Minister said the Department of Health and Social Care was looking at what it could do to introduce systems to record waiting times ’so that we can publish them as soon as the data is available’.

He said that did not necessarily mean waiting for Manx Care, the new operational arm of health services, to become fully operational.

’As soon as it is in a format that is able to be published, it will be published.’

The lack of information was highlighted after a question from Claire Christian (Douglas South) who asked for a breakdown of waiting times for mental health treatment over the last four years. Mr Ashford revealed the DHSC has ’not historically collected’ data on waiting times from the first GP appointment to accessing mental health services.

He said: ’Data relating to maximum waiting time for follow-up post-psychiatric in-patient discharge has, however, been collected on a monthly basis since April 2017.

’The Isle of Man target has been five days’ maximum waiting time, which was reduced to three days from September 2020, compared to a seven-day target applied by the English NHS.’

He provided yearly average percentages of compliance with the five-day target: 2017-18, 80.25%; 2018-19, 86.5%; 2019-20, 79.9%; March 2020 to August 2020, 98.4%.

Since the introduction of the three-day follow-up target in September, there has been 100% compliance.