Mental Health Workforce Data

Thursday 21st March 2019 Written Statements

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Jackie Doyle-Price)]

The NHS long-term plan set out this Government’s ambition to transform how the NHS supports mental health, building on the work already under way to deliver the commitments in the “Five Year Forward View for Mental Health”.

Our plans depend on having the right workforce in place. The Government, in consultation with NHS England, Health Education England and NHS Improvement, asked NHS Digital to review how it counts the mental health workforce with the goal of providing us with a more accurate possible baseline against which to track progress towards delivering our ambitions.

Previously, several different approaches had been taken, including counting total numbers of staff working in mental health, learning disability and care trusts, which included staff working in other specialisms, such as community health staff who support people’s physical health. NHS Digital has developed a new approach that will improve accuracy by counting only those staff who work directly on mental health, regardless of the type of organisation in which they work. It will also provide a greater level of transparency in relation to the workforce, for example, staff working in priority areas, such as crisis care or children and young people’s mental health services.

NHS Digital will publish its quarterly mental health workforce data under this new definition on 21 March 2019. Because it focuses on staff working directly on mental health in NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts, the new headline figures will show a smaller total number of people working in mental health They do not yet provide a full picture of the mental health workforce. For example, they do not include the very significant number of staff providing NHS-funded mental health services in other organisations such as the voluntary sector, local authorities and primary care settings. We are therefore planning further changes to the data in the future to enable us to better understand these staff numbers and associated patient outcomes.

This new approach underlines the scale of the challenge ahead of us to make the increases we all agree are needed to the mental health workforce and bring about improvements to the lives of the people they are here to support. The Government are committed to meeting this challenge. Following the recent publication of the NHS long-term plan, the Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Health and Social Care asked Baroness Dido Harding to develop a workforce implementation plan.

An interim workforce plan will be published in the spring and will include an immediate 2019-20 action plan together with a more detailed vision of how the health and care workforce will transform over the next 10 years to deliver 21st century care for our patients. The plan will build on work already under way to recruit, train and importantly retain more staff to address our most immediate shortages.

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