Staff crisis hitting child mental health

LACK OF specialist practitioners is the biggest barrier to increasing access to mental health services for children, NHS bosses have said, with the loss of nursing bursaries and poor retention rates among the factors blamed.

At a Public Accounts Committee meeting Claire Murdoch, the national director for mental health for NHS England, said getting the workforce right was “the biggest rate setting factor”.

The government had previously announced £1.4bn of funding for child and adolescent mental health services in 2014/2015 after it emerged that thousands were being refused treatment because they didn’t meet the threshold for mental ill-health.

Ms Murdoch said: “I think workforce is the single biggest defining factor of our ability to deliver.”

Professor Ian Cummings, chief executive of Health Education England (HEE), said the loss of student bursaries had caused the numbers of mature students to plummet.

He said: “We’ve seen a broadly flat level of people applying for mental health nurse training places over the last two or three years which coincides with the (removal) of the bursary.

“The average age of people entering undergraduate nurse training has gone down, so it certainly looks as if the move towards the introduction of student loan funding has had an impact on the more mature entrants.”

He said that historically mental health nursing had attracted higher numbers of mature entrants than other branches of nursing, and that HEE was trying to combat this loss by focusing on pathways that allow people to train while working.

On Monday Chancellor Philip Hammond announced a cash boost for mental health services in the autumn Budget.