Northern Ireland cannot tell you how many people are waiting for mental health care.
Last week, the Royal College of Psychiatrists Northern Ireland published their annual workforce census. It confirmed what many of us already suspected: 29% of consultant psychiatrist posts are either vacant or covered by locum doctors. 34% of specialist roles aren’t permanently filled. Northern Ireland has the highest psychiatry vacancy rate in the entire UK, while simultaneously having the greatest mental health need.
That is a crisis by any definition. But it was a single sentence in Dr Julie Anderson’s statement that stopped us cold.
“We still don’t have comprehensive regional data on mental health waiting lists, meaning the true scale of unmet need remains very unclear.”
No comprehensive data. On mental health waiting lists. In Northern Ireland. In 2026.
Let us be blunt about what this means.
Physical health waiting lists in Northern Ireland are published every quarter. As of September 2025, 542,451 people were waiting for a first consultant-led outpatient appointment. The median wait was over 64 weeks. Not a single HSC Trust met its targets. That is shocking, but at least we know it. At least those numbers are in the public domain.
For mental health? The last comprehensive adult waiting list figure available is 16,000 people, from March 2022. Before the full post-pandemic surge in referrals. Before the workforce crisis deepened to its current state.
CAMHS statistics, for children and young people, were only first published in June 2023, and are already incomplete. Belfast Trust’s figures are missing from mid-2024 through to early 2025 due to the Encompass system rollout. Northern Trust data is missing for recent quarters too.
The system is not just broken. In many cases, it isn’t being watched.
The question JustMental is asking:
Why aren’t mental health waiting lists routinely published the same way physical health waiting lists are?
It may partly be a data systems problem. It may partly be a resourcing issue. The NI Audit Office flagged the absence of proper outcome measurement back in 2022. Nothing has changed.
But we also think it’s worth asking the harder question: would publishing these numbers, in full, every quarter, create a level of public accountability that the system is simply not ready to face?
Because if the figures showed that tens of thousands of people in Northern Ireland are waiting months or years for mental health care, and that number was published openly, regularly, in the same news cycle as physical health waiting times, the pressure to act would be impossible to contain.
JustMental is calling on the Department of Health, Health Minister Mike Nesbitt, and all five HSC Trusts to make a public commitment to quarterly, comprehensive mental health waiting list data, adult and CAMHS, published transparently and consistently.
People are waiting. They deserve to be counted.
