Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps he has taken to support the mental health well-being of NHS staff.

Employers across the National Health Service are responsible for implementing a supportive, nurturing, learning culture enabling staff to thrive which will help improve and maintain their mental health and wellbeing.

Organisations are being supported by NHS England’s NHS staff health and wellbeing framework which provides diagnostic tools and intervention options such as counselling and talking therapies to help trusts address staff mental health issues.

NHS England’s 2017/19 Commissioning for Quality and Innovation incentive programme encourages trusts to provide services to improve staff mental health. To qualify for an incentive payment, trusts must demonstrate a 5% improvement or a 75% positive response rate in the percentage of staff suffering from work related stress plus one of the other two health and wellbeing related questions.

NHS England is also expanding its practitioner health programme, a mental health support scheme to help doctors across the NHS.

NHS Improvement is collaborating with 73 trusts to improve staff mental health by identifying 10 high impact actions to spread across the NHS including faster access to accredited occupational health services.