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FGM Cases over last 10 years

Reference: 23-24472

Date response sent: 16/02/2024

Details of enquiry

  1. How many patients have come into your care with Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) that was noticed and/or attended to, between January 2014-February 2024 calendar years?

NOTE: Please specify if the data is relating to a physical or mental health concern and please make sure to list the physical and mental health concerns separately.

 

  1. Between January 2014 to February 2024: how much has the trust spent (or how much has it cost) for the following things relating to FGM, where relevant:
    • corrective FGM (whatever actions need to be taken to correct or improve the damage caused by FGM)
    • surgery
    • procedures (non-surgical)
    • appointments for mental health – counselling, therapy, group therapy etc. This includes mental health trusts dealing with any form of secondary treatment for FGM as I appreciate acute trusts would look after primary physical care.

NOTE:  Please specify if the data is relating to a physical or mental health concern and please make sure to list the physical and mental health concerns separately.

  1. How many FGM-related deaths has your trust seen between January 2014- February 2024? Please specify how if FGM was a primary or secondary cause of death.

For each of these 3 questions and the sub-sections, could you provide the data in calendar year and could you split the data by month and year (e.g. January 2014, February 2014).

Please provide all of this data in a machine readable format, ideally CSV and provide answers to each question in a separate tab (in this case 3 tabs).

To stress, my questions require answers covering all ages.

Response sent

It is important for your contextual understanding of our answers below that you are aware that the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust is a specialist mental health Trust, and not a hospital.  We provide outpatient, and mainly psychological, services.  We do not provide acute services, nor inpatient patient services, and do not have an  A&E department.

 

  1. How many patients have come into your care with Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) that was noticed and/or attended to, between January 2014-February 2024 calendar years?

We do not hold data on FGM as a presenting condition, though this might be recorded in the patient’s files as a cause of the patient’s mental health condition, or on risk assessments associated with the patients’ mental health condition.

Any records of this data would be held on the notes section of individual patient files which cannot be collated through an automated process. Obtaining the information requested would therefore require a manual search of thousands of files. Searching each patient file would take 10 minutes, and so 166 hours per thousand files searched.

 

Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act makes provision for NHS organisations to refuse questions for information where the cost of processing the whole request (which includes determining whether the Trust holds the information, locating, and then extracting it) exceeds £450, or 18 hours of work from one member of staff.

The time required to process this question falls outside this limit, and is therefore refused in line with provision in the Freedom of Information Act.

 

We do not have a dedicated service dealing with the effects of FGM on patients mental health.

  1. Between January 2014 to February 2024: how much has the trust spent (or how much has it cost) for the following things relating to FGM, where relevant:
  • corrective FGM (whatever actions need to be taken to correct or improve the damage caused by FGM)

not applicable.  We do not provide acute care and do not provide any surgical interventions.  .

  • surgery

see above response

  • procedures (non-surgical)

not applicable.  The Trust provides talking therapies and no physical procedures.

  • appointments for mental health – counselling, therapy, group therapy etc. This includes mental health trusts dealing with any form of secondary treatment for FGM as I appreciate acute trusts would look after primary physical care.

We do not provide any dedicated mental health treatments specifically designed for FGM.  See our response to Q1 above.

 

  1. How many FGM-related deaths has your trust seen between January 2014- February 2024? Please specify how if FGM was a primary or secondary cause of death.

The Trust routinely receives Freedom of Information requests about deaths of service users and potential causes, including suicide, linked to the whole Trust or just specific services and recognises the significant public interest argument linked to disclosure of this information.

This must be balanced with the reality that, as the Trust only provides outpatient services, it would be highly unlikely for a patient to die whilst under treatment on our premises.  and due to the nature of its mental health services, the Trust may generally only hold mortality data provided to it, and it may take up to 2/3 years for to be validated and/or made available and a patient’s death may be unrelated to Trust service provision, and due to other causes, like FGM.  .

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