The Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has claimed thousands more mental health workers are to be recruited by the NHS in England. Hunt stated this recruitment drive was to end the ‘historic imbalance’ between mental and physical health services.
The Government’s aim is to recruit enough nurses, therapists and consultants to treat an extra one million mental health patients by 2020-21. The Government said an extra £1bn promised for mental health services in England would fund this scheme.
In 2016, the Government committed £1.3bn to transform mental health care provision. Some of this money will be spent on crisis care plans, but most focus will be on recruiting 2,000 members of staff within child and adolescent mental health services and recruitment of 2,900 therapists delivering talking therapies for adults and nurses working in crisis care. The plans also include improving staff training and addressing a high dropout rate among trainees.
However, data published last week showed that even before this latest recruitment drive, many thousands of nursing posts remain unfilled. Mr Hunt said ‘we want people with mental health conditions to receive better treatment, and part of that means having the right NHS staff’. Mr Hunt said the measures were ‘ambitious’ and amounted to ‘one of the biggest expansions of mental health services in Europe’.
However, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Mental Health, Barbara Keeley, said ‘the workforce plan provides no real answers on how these new posts will be funded or how recruitment issues will be overcome’. Keeley added, it also ‘offers little hope to those working in the sector faced with mounting workloads, low pay and poor morale’.
Notwithstanding, Prof Wendy Burn, President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said 570 extra consultants have been promised in the plans because “you would expect to see a consultant if you had cancer and the same applies for mental health”. But Janet Davies, Chief Executive and General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said: ‘there is already a dangerous lack of workforce planning and accountability and this report is unable to provide detail on how the ambitions will be met’. Janet Davies went on to say ‘under this Government, there are 5,000 fewer mental health nurses and that goes some way to explaining why patients are being failed’.