Community Health Services: Children
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of waiting times for children’s community health services; and what steps he is taking to reduce waiting times for those services.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock
Community health services are an essential building block in developing a neighbourhood health service, working closely with primary care, social care, and other community services to provide more care in the community to spot problems early.
We are committed to reducing long waits and improving timely access to community health services, including for children’s services. We are working closely with NHS England to improve access to community health services and on actions to reduce waiting times for these services.
NHS England continues to monitor community services waiting times via the Community Health Services (CHS) SitRep data collection which collects monthly data on waiting lists and waiting times for community health services, to assess the number of people on them and the length of time they wait for services. Data is published monthly, and is available at the following link:
A metric on waits of over 52 weeks for CHS is included in the 2025/26 National Oversight Framework, which is available at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/nhs-oversight-framework-2025-26/
As part of our work to improve access to children’s CHS, NHS England commissioned NHS Benchmarking to undertake an analysis of provider data on Community Paediatrics to develop a detailed understanding of activity and the opportunities for improvement and transformation. The report is available at the following link:
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