Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what data his Department collects on pre-registration attrition and retention of students on mental health courses following the implementation of Health Education England’s Reducing Pre-Registration Attrition and Improving Retention project.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
The Department does not collect data on attrition and retention of pre-registration students on mental health nursing courses.
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the document, Stepping forward to 2020/21: The mental health workforce plan for England, published by the NHS in July 2017, how many of the additional 19,000 mental health staff to be recruited by 2020 were employed by July 2018.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
Stepping forward to 2020/21: The mental health workforce plan for England, published in July 2017, sets out our ambition to deliver 21,000 new posts (professional and allied) across the mental health system, with the expectation that 19,000 of these places will be filled by staff employed directly by the National Health Service.
NHS Digital publish statistics on NHS mental health workforce. Latest data available, as at March 2018, shows that there are 183,476 full time equivalent staff working in mental health in NHS using the widest possible view of the Mental Health and Learning Disability workforce. This is an increase of 915 (0.5%) compared to March 2017 (the baseline year for Stepping Forward). A one-year comparison is given to remove the impact of seasonality, caused by training and recruitment cycles.
Health Education England and NHS England are currently developing a mental health workforce dashboard which will publicly track progress against the targets and commitments set out in Stepping Forward.
In addition to expanding the mental health workforce, the Government also recognises that retaining our skilled staff is crucial. That’s why NHS Improvement and NHS England have been rolling out a special retention programme supporting those trusts with high levels of staff attrition. Directors of Nursing and mental health experts are working directly with trusts to develop ‘Rapid Improvement Plans’ on retention. These plans are required to set out plans for improvements over the next 12 months. Additionally, there are a series of retention master classes which are being rolled out, aimed at Directors of Nursing and HR Directors.
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many (a) posts and (b) vacancies were there in mental health NHS trusts in England in the most recent month for which data is available.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
NHS Improvement collect vacancy rates from individual National Health Service providers and publish them as part of their “Quarterly performance of the NHS provider sector” report.
There are 53 NHS mental health providers. The most recent data reported in Q1 2018/19 (as at the end of June 2018) shows that there are 187,215 Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) workforce staff in post with 22,018 vacancies. This is a vacancy rate of 10.5% out of a total workforce establishment (209,233 WTE). This information represents management information only and not an official statistic.
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of mental health staff that have left the NHS since June 2017.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
NHS Digital publishes Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS) workforce statistics. These include staff working in hospital trusts and clinical commissioning groups, but not staff working in primary care or in general practitioner surgeries, local authorities or other providers.
In England, 23,6861 mental health staff left the National Health Service between June 2017 and 31 May 2018, headcount.
The figure above provides the widest possible view of the mental health workforce available from NHS Digital and includes:
- All staff in mental health, learning disability and care trusts;
- Psychiatry doctors;
- Nurses specialising in “community psychiatry”, “other psychiatry”, “community learning disabilities, “other learning disabilities”; and
- Staff with a primary area of work of “psychiatry”, for example a paediatrician whose primary area of work is ‘psychiatry’.
Data for Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is not available on the Electronic Staff Record and therefore, not included in the figure above.
1Source: NHS Digital, NHS HCHS workforce statistics.
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Education on educating children and young people about online trolling and the support that is available to them to aid psychological wellbeing and build resilience.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
Across Government, we are clear for the need to take action to tackle the increase in cyberbullying and are incorporating such action within related work streams across health, education and culture. The Department of Education is clear that all schools are legally required to have a behaviour policy with measures to prevent all forms of bullying - including cyberbullying - and recognise that bullying of any kind can now, just as easily, occur online as face to face.
Teaching about social media and internet safety will be integrated into the new subjects of Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education, which schools will be encouraged and supported to teach from September 2019 and required to teach from September 2020. Pupils will be taught about online risks so they can learn to recognise potential dangers for themselves, and about broader steps they can take to protect and support their own and others’ health and wellbeing.
The Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education will continue to work together as we enter the implementation phase of the Green Paper on Transforming Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services, which aims to improve provision of mental health support in schools and enable children and young people to access earlier help for emerging problems.
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport on tackling online trolling and the effect of trolling on people’s psychological wellbeing.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
The current Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (the Rt. hon. Matt Hancock MP) is yet to discuss online trolling with the current Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (the Rt. hon. Jeremy Wright MP). However, this Government is clear that online abuse of any kind is unacceptable and the Departments are working together on this.
To help tackle some of the issues around the potential negative impacts of the online environment for children and young people’s mental health, the previous Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (the Rt. hon. Jeremy Hunt MP) and the previous Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (the Rt. hon. Matt Hancock MP) set up a working group with social media companies. Within this group we discussed how the companies could take concrete action, particularly in the areas of improved age verification tackling long periods online and harmful content.
We understand that companies have some existing work in place in these areas, and that there are significant challenges, but we are keen for further action to be taken. This is why the previous Secretary of State for Health and Social Care asked social media companies to set out their formal positions on this work and how they envisage we could work together to make further progress. We have received a number of responses and we are working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport as we consider our next steps, including our contribution to their joint work with the Home Office on a White Paper on on-line harms, following their Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper.
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress has been made since 2016 on the target of a 10% reduction in suicides by 2020-21.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
The Government is committed to meeting the target in the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health to reduce suicides in England by 10% by 2020/21. In 2016, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published data on suicide registrations for 2015, which showed that there were 4,820 suicides in England and the suicide rate was 10.1 per 100,000 of the population.
This month the ONS published data on suicide registrations for 2017, which showed there were 4,451 suicides in England and the suicide rate was 9.2 per 100,000 of the population. This is a decrease in the number of suicides between 2015 and 2017 of 7.7% and shows good progress against meeting the target of a 10% reduction.
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of trends in the level job vacancies in the mental health workforce.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
It is not possible based on currently available data to make a robust assessment of trends in levels of job vacancies.
There is currently no single definition of what is meant by a vacancy or how it is counted. For example, some may consider a vacancy to exist as soon as a trust is actively recruiting for an unfilled position, while others may count one whether the role is being actively recruited for or not. NHS Digital is actively working with NHS Improvement to develop a consistent approach to counting and reporting vacancy data. It is not currently possible to identify unfilled vacancies or chronically hard to fill posts.
The most recent published management information data from NHS Improvement covers the fourth quarter of 2017/18 (to the end of March 2018) and by sector, it is split according to registered nursing and midwifery and medical staff.
The data shows that at Q4 2017/18, there were 6,714 (10.5%) full time equivalent (FTE) nursing and midwifery vacancies in the mental health sector, 441 fewer than in Q1 2017/18. There were 1,309 FTE (13.15%) medical vacancies in the mental health sector, 52 more when compared to Q1 2017/18.
Source: NHS Improvement
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what information he holds on the total number of qualified staff working in mental health services.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
NHS Digital published an experimental set of statistics and analysis on the National Health Service mental health workforce measures and numbers in January 2018. These figures are updated quarterly, and the latest data, as at March 2018 shows that there are 95,712 full time equivalent professionally qualified clinical staff working in mental health.
NHS Digital, the Department and Health Education England are working together to refine the definitions used to count those working in mental health.
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have to ensure that social media companies (a) tackle online trolls and (b) improve the reporting process for victims of that abuse.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
This Government is clear that online abuse of any kind is unacceptable. Social media can be a way of making positive social connections, and should never be used as a platform to abuse or bully individuals. Evidence has shown links between certain increases in social media use and poorer mental health, however it is not clear whether increased use causes poorer mental health. For example, it is possible that poorer mental health drives an increase in use of social media. To better understand the relationship between social media and the mental health of children and young people up to 25 years old, the Chief Medical Officer is leading a review to examine all relevant international research in the area. The review will inform a report from the Chief Medical Officer, expected for publication next year.
To help tackle some of these issues, we have talked to social media companies about taking concrete action, particularly in the areas of improved age verification for underage children, tackling long periods online and harmful content. We understand that companies have existing work in place in these areas, and that there are significant challenges, but we are keen for further action to be taken. This is why the former Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (the. Rt. hon. Jeremy Hunt) asked social media companies to set out their formal positions on this work and how they envisage we could work together to make further progress. We have received a number of responses and we are working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport as we consider our next steps, and they work with the Home Office on a White Paper on Internet Harms, following their consultation on internet safety.