NHS mental health action plan to boost staff workforce

Plans set out by NHS England to tackle ‘inadequate’ mental health care will include expansions across a range of services, including a significant increase in the size of the mental health staff workforce.

The news comes after the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health found that mental health care in the NHS was ‘inadequate’ and called for a series of changes to be made.

In its recently published implementation plan, NHS England has set out a range of goals which include ensuring all acute hospitals have mental health liaison teams in place by 2020-21; early intervention and crisis teams in the community; liaison and diversion work with offenders; and perinatal mental health.

The document acknowledged that to deliver such objectives ‘the existing workforce capacity will need to increase’. The plan suggested that £15 million of funding for local sustainability and transformation plans should be allocated in 2017-18 to support the development of liaison services, increasing to £120 million in 2020-21.

The document also said: “The majority of crisis resolution and home treatment teams (CRHTTs) are not currently sufficiently resourced to operate 24/7, with caseloads above levels that allow teams to fulfil their core functions of a community-based crisis response and intensive home treatment as an alternative to admission.”

“Additional investment will be deployed to ensure that primary care staff feel confident in actively supporting people with severe mental illness to access relevant physical health screenings and interventions.”

NHS England has also confirmed it is working with national workforce planning body Health Education England to develop a number of innovative recruitment and training models.

Welcoming the new plans, Claire Murdoch, NHS England’s new director for mental health, said they would ‘improve access and outcomes, reduce inequality and deliver efficiencies across the local health and care economy’.

Murdoch added: “As well as setting out our expectations of the NHS, we have outlined how national partners will work together to provide the right enabling structures and frameworks, to support and help drive improvements in mental health over the coming years.

“Other organisations who have a role to play such as social care, employers, schools are also paramount to the success of this work. The need for action cannot be ignored. It is now up to all of us to make this a reality.”