Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has any targets to increase the availability of mental health care training opportunities.

The Government asked Health Education England (HEE) to work across all health bodies to develop a Mental Health Workforce plan, which was published in July 2017. ‘Stepping forward to 2020/21: The mental health workforce plan for England’ sets out concrete steps 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.

The document is available at the following link:

https://hee.nhs.uk/our-work/mental-health

Health Education England will take this plan into account as it continues to commission mental health care training for professions such as clinical psychology, Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) professionals, general psychiatry, child and adolescent psychiatry and forensic psychiatry.

The expansion target for adult IAPT professionals is 4,500 between 2016 and 2021. For children and young people’s IAPT professionals, HEE will recruit and train 1,700 new professionals and train 3,400 existing NHS staff between 2016 and 2021.

Across the NHS, there will be an extra 10,000 training places for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals by 2020.