This analysis presents the number of new referrals to secondary mental health services where the person was aged between 0 and 17 at the time of referral. Data is also presented on the number of people discharged where the person was aged between 0 and 17 at the time of the original referral. This means that for some people, they may have been aged 18 or over at the time of discharge.
The data presented is at England and Local Authority (LA) level and includes breakdowns by age, gender and ethnicity.
Please note the following when using this analysis:
- this data is sourced from the Mental Health Services Dataset (MHSDS). The data has been provided by month for the time period April 2021 to July 2025 and incudes counts of new referrals and discharges in each given month
- the data provided is a count of referrals and not people. Therefore, it is possible to sum the number of referrals across multiple months to arrive at a total figure, however, the data cannot provide a number for how many people were referred to services as one person may have had multiple referrals
- this analysis is based on referrals where the age at referral received date is between 0 and 17. The data provided includes all team types
- where data for discharges is presented, the ages presented are based on the age at discharge. As such, a category for 18 plus is included for those people who were referred between the ages of 0 and 17 but were not discharged until they were 18 or over
- discharge reason is only available for referrals from April 2024
- data has been provided at both national and local authority district geographies
- for sub-national data, all figures have been rounded to the nearest 5 and suppressed when less than 5. This includes all data broken down at LA level and demographic data at national level