Publication, Part of Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics
Mental Health Services Monthly Statistics, Performance May 2026
Official statistics
Issue with Children and Young People Eating Disorders (CYPED) data
An issue has been identified with the CYPED data within his publication. The set out methodology should remove inpatients from the calculations, however, this had not happened. As such some counts for referrals entering treatment and still waiting are higher than anticipated. For those still waiting, the count is thought to be around 2% higher. The data for this will not be restated but will be corrected as part of the end of year run for 2026-27.
15 July 2026 09:30 AM
Issue with Community Mental Health Access (MHS108) data
Please note, an issue has been uncovered regarding MHS108, Number of people accessing community mental health services for adults and older adults with 2 or more care contacts within the RP. Within the metric, duplicate records were causing instances where a person had 1 contact to be counted. This issue was exacerbated in April and May 2026 data with the additional mapping for Sub ICB boundaries. In correcting the methodology, it was also discovered that historically a small number of records were also being counted where the referral had received 1 contact where they were referred to multiple services as part of the same referral. Data for 2026-27 has been corrected and replaced. Data for 2025-26 will be restated as part of the end of year run. Historic data beyond 2025-26 will not be restated and as such these figures are likely to be somewhere around 2-3% higher than the actual number.
24 July 2026 11:30 AM
Summary
This publication provides the timeliest picture available of people using NHS funded secondary mental health, learning disabilities and autism services in England, excluding those who are solely in contact with Talking Therapies. This information will be of use to people needing access to information quickly for operational decision making and other purposes. More detailed information on the quality and completeness of these statistics is available in the Data Quality section, as well as within the Data Coverage and Data Quality VODIM and Integrity files available under 'Resources'.
Highlights
Contact Us
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Access the code used to create this report
The code used to create the outputs for this report is available on our NHS Digital GitHub webpage.
2.36 million people had an open referral with mental health services, at the end of May
The majority of these (1.65 million) had an open referral with adult mental health services
527,972 people had an open referral with children and young people’s mental health services, at the end of May
288,836 people had an open referral with learning disabilities and autism services, at the end of May
476,278 new referrals were received during May
2.29 million care contacts were attended during May
24,176 people were subject to the Mental Health Act, including 16,619 people detained in hospital, at the end of May
Resources
Last edited: 24 July 2026 11:38 am