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 held with NHS England on the specialised recruitment of mental health nurses.

There have been no specific discussions on the specialised recruitment of mental health nurses.

To recruit more mental health nurses, NHS England and NHS Improvement are supporting mental health trusts to develop specialised international recruitment infrastructure and teams. To date, 1,500 international nurses have been recruited to work in mental health settings, with 490 of these joining mental health trusts in the past twelve months.

The mental health workforce directly employed by the National Health Service has increased by 18,000 whole time equivalents between March 2016 and March 2021. Our aim is to increase the mental health workforce by an additional 27,000 healthcare professionals by 2023/24 to support the transformation of NHS mental health services and allow an additional 2 million people to access the mental health support they need.