Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve mental health support for NHS doctors.

Improving the mental health of our National Health Service staff including doctors is a top priority. Last year, NHS England announced the expansion of the Practitioner Health Programme, a free and confidential NHS service to treat doctors’ mental health or addiction problems, in particular where these might affect their work.

The Department also continues to discuss doctors’ contractual terms and conditions of service with the British Medical Association and employers to ensure they are up to date, fit for purpose helping protect their mental health and wellbeing through negotiated improvements.

As set out in the interim NHS People Plan, like all NHS staff, doctors should benefit from NHS work over the summer to “develop a new offer with staff setting out explicitly the support they can expect from the NHS as a modern employer” including ensuring everyone feels they have voice, control and influence, which covers staff mental health and wellbeing. This will be published after the Spending Review and could include implementation of recommendations from Health Education England’s NHS Staff and Learner Mental Wellbeing Programme report such as introducing Well Being Guardians in NHS trusts, personal wellbeing supervisors for learners including doctors in training, NHS organisations independently examining the death by suicide of any member of NHS staff or learner working in the NHS and “safe spaces” accessible to all for reflection, learning and breaks.

The new offer will build on the progress being made in implementing the NHS staff health and wellbeing framework which provides organisations with diagnostic and intervention options to help them provide the mental health services their staff need such as counselling and talking therapies. The Framework and NHS Improvement’s s staff health and wellbeing collaborative of 73 trusts embed the mental health standards set out in ‘Thriving at Work – a review of mental health and employers’ commissioned by the Government. Implementing ‘Thriving at Work’ is a requirement under the NHS Standard contract.

NHS England’s 2017/19 Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) Incentive scheme has been encouraging trusts to improve the services they provide to help staff mental health with payments for improvement in the percentage of staff answering “no” to the NHS Staff Survey question “During the last 12 months have you felt unwell as a result of work related stress?”