Allied Health Professionals

Josh Newbury Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Josh Newbury (Cannock Chase) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) for leading the debate and my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley (Sonia Kumar), who has done so much incredible work as a physiotherapist previously and a staunch advocate of allied health professionals since her first day in this House. I pay tribute to the AHP community across my constituency.

In my past life, I had the pleasure of working at the Coventry and Warwickshire partnership NHS trust, and that experience shapes how I have approached this debate. Many Members have rightly recognised the roles of physiotherapists, paramedics, occupational therapists, and speech and language therapists, which are well recognised and rightly valued. But under the AHP umbrella are an incredible group of people I would like to pay tribute to: music, art and drama therapists. Those roles are not “nice to haves”; they are a vital part of our mental health workforce.

I saw during my time at CWPT how powerful the benefits of creative therapy are. As my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock described so eloquently in her excellent speech focused on paediatrics, for lots of people who have experienced trauma, who live with conditions that can make verbal communication difficult or who do not yet speak fluent English, such as refugees, common forms of talking therapy that work for so many people do not necessarily work for them. For those experiencing mutism, for example, creative therapies can be the only way they can access treatment. Through art, music and drama, lots of patients are able to process their experiences, communicate their emotions and rebuild a sense of self in ways that traditional models do not always reach.

At CWPT, there was a real investment in these services. Importantly, many therapists were directly employed, rather than brought in on short-term contracts. That not only offers stability to the workforce, but for patients it allows services to embed, relationships to develop and outcomes undoubtedly to improve. I had the privilege of seeing and hearing those patients’ stories for myself, and in so many cases the work of those therapists was quite literally life-changing.

Despite that, these professionals are often in short supply. Part of that issue, in my view, is visibility. These roles often are not spoken about in schools, careers advice and even, at times, in our broader conversations about the NHS workforce. There are now established degree and training pathways for these roles. They are skilled professions that require significant training and expertise and are recognised through professional bodies regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council, yet many young people with a creative inclination and flare are all too often unaware of them as a possible career path. That is a missed opportunity, both for those individuals, who often have a passion for caring and for sharing their creativity, and for our NHS and social care.

The Government are rightly focused on getting more people into work—in particular young people, who are facing a tough job market—and we should be thinking expansively about the routes that are available to them, including in creative and arts-based professions. For those who are drawn to the arts, music and drama, these roles can be a way to build a deeply rewarding, stable career in the NHS—a career that combines creativity with care and contributes directly to patient wellbeing. Importantly, for those who might have spent years navigating the uncertainty of freelance creative industries, these professions can provide a real sense of stability, progression and purpose, without them having to leave any of their skills behind. That is particularly true at times of life when stability is so valuable, such as when starting a family.

The Government have been clear that the workforce plan that will stem from the very welcome 10-year plan will focus on how we can make good on its priorities, including shifting care closer to patients, bringing fragmented services together and a greater focus on mental health. Sitting at the centre of the Venn diagram of all those things is creative therapies. Let us start with the therapists of tomorrow by improving awareness of those roles through schools, colleges and careers services. Let us look at widening training pathways, to ensure that these careers are open to a wide range of people, including career switchers.

Currently, there is a level 7—master’s level—degree apprenticeship for the three main forms of creative therapy, but as of this year, funding for level 7 apprenticeships has been largely restricted to under-21s, so the number of people accessing those higher-level courses will now be very small. Given that in mental health, many staff move up into roles from within the workforce, it would be fantastic if an apprenticeship pathway through to creative therapist roles could be developed, similar to what we see in nursing.

Above all, we should recognise that the impact of those already in these roles is not peripheral; it is central to so many patients’ care and recovery. Investing in this area would not only support individual recovery, which would ease pressure elsewhere in the system and enable the earlier intervention that so many Members have referred to, but lead to improved engagement and, ultimately, better outcomes. Art therapists, music therapists and drama therapists might not be the first roles we think of in mental health, but they can often be the ones that help our most vulnerable and isolated constituents to start to open up and communicate their experiences—often for the first time—and guide the way to wellbeing.

We talk a lot in this place about workforce shortages, and rightly so. There are thousands of young people out there, including in Cannock Chase, who love music, art and drama but perhaps worry about whether there is a career for them in creative industries. They might have absolutely no idea about the enormous contribution they would make in our healthcare workforce. This is partly about recognition, but it is also about being more imaginative in how we think about both healthcare and careers advice. It is a chance to give more people a way to use their creative passion to transform lives.