£500m fuels mental health recovery plan

29 March 2021 Steve Brown

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The plan for 2021/22 is an attempt to respond to the impact of the pandemic on public mental health, recognising that isolation and stress have hit key groups badly, including children and young people, exacerbating access problems in some services.Nadine.Dorries L

Minister for mental health and suicide prevention, Nadine Dorries (pictured) said mental health services were there for those that needed support. ‘I am acutely aware of the impact the pandemic has had on the mental health and wellbeing of many, she said. ‘The public has shown great resilience during these challenging times, but some groups, including young people and those with severe mental illness, have been impacted more than others.

‘This funding will support these groups, both in initiatives specifically designed in the wake of the pandemic, and by enabling us to bring forward our NHS long-term plan commitments.’

The £500m was announced as part of £3bn of additional funding in last year’s spending review. The other £2.5bn includes £1bn to start tackling the elective backlog and £1.5bn to help ease existing pressures in the NHS caused by Covid-19.

However, some of the funds have already been allocated. Details were released earlier in March of £79m that would be used to boost mental health support for children, including a significant expansion of school mental health support teams.  And a further £87m to support discharge from mental health facilities was announced two weeks ago alongside the £6.6bn of additional Covid support for the NHS.

But the new announcement allocates the remaining £334m across various programmes. To accelerate delivery of long-term plan commitments, some £58m will help to bring forward the expansion of integrated primary and secondary care for adults and older adults with severe mental illness. Mental health practitioner roles will be embedded in primary care networks and eating disorder pathways will be boosted.

Crisis lines will receive a further £13m, while £38 will help to expand the capacity of IAPT services (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies).

Workforce growth will be supported with an additional £111m, while £170m will be used to ‘tackle critical backlogs’ arising from the pandemic. While this includes the £87m to support discharge, additional funds will support the transition of 18- to 25-year-olds to adult services. And learning disabilities and autism services will benefit from an additional £31m. In particular this will help to address the diagnostic backlog in autism services and look to prevent young people escalating into crisis.

NHS Providers said it welcomed the plan and the further clarity on how the £500m funding would be targeted.   It was also pleased that the government had acknowledged that the plan was just a ‘first milestone’ ahead of more work to follow. ‘We know more funding will be required over the longer term, on a sustainable basis, and mental health services prioritised in a system context,’ it said in a briefing published this week.

The representative body called for ‘clear, realistic priorities’ for the sector in line with the new context it is operating in, with flexibility for local areas to make decisions that work best for their communities. And it said that further attention was also needed on public health and social care. ‘It also seems likely a more systematic approach to promoting the resilience of the voluntary sector is needed,’ the briefing said. ‘Trust leaders continue to be concerned by the precarious financial position of key local and voluntary sector partners and the significant impact of this on people who rely on the services they provide.’

To gauge the impact of the investment, the government said it would continue to monitor self-reported mental health and wellbeing outcomes and demand in general. It added that it would also continue to collect access and quality metrics reported in the mental health dashboard.

Ms Dorries, in a joint foreword with paymaster general Penny Mordaunt, said the plan represented ’our most ambitious cross-government, whole-person approach to date to promote mental health and support people living with mental illness to recover and live well’. She said it built on collaboration during the pandemic and said it also represented a ‘call to action for the whole of society’ to look after their own wellbeing and reach out for support when necessary. However, she added that it was only beginning and ‘there is much more work to do’.