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Members of the U.K.’s parliament have warned growing demand for mental health services is already outstripping supply, with more than a million people waiting for care.
Experts on the country’s public health system — the National Health Service — have warned of a ‘growing crisis’ in mental health.
Although staff numbers have risen in recent years, this growth is being rapidly outpaced by mental health referrals, MPs on the Public Accounts Committee said in a report published Friday.
Referrals into the public sector mental health service have risen by 44% between the 2016/17 and 2022/23 financial years, the committee found. But the workforce to care for these patients has only grown by 22%.
Acute mental health inpatient facilities were facing vacancy rates of 20% or more, with an increasing proportion of staff leaving for “work-life balance reasons”.
Like much of the country’s health sector, pressures have intensified over the pandemic as demand has grown and the workforce has been squeezed by sickness and burn out.
Commenting on the committee’s findings, industry leader Sean Duggan, said in a statement that “mental health has historically been a low priority for government.”
“Yet demand for mental health services has remained high, with 1.2 million people currently waiting for support.”
Around 10 million people are also thought to need extra support for the mental health following the pandemic, said Duggan, who heads the mental health network at industry group NHS Confederation.
“Mental health leaders and their teams are pulling out all the stops but can only do so much in what are very constrained circumstances,” he said, adding that “The growing crisis in mental health services cannot be allowed to spiral and must not be overlooked.”
Despite more than a decade of government promises to give mental health the same priority as physical health, it still wasn’t clear exactly how this would be done — or what it even meant. No definition for so-called “parity of esteem” had been set, the PAC committee noted.
Member of parliament and PAC chair Dame Meg Hillier MP said in a statement: “The findings of our inquiry must serve as a warning to the Government that mental health is still in danger of not being treated with the same urgent priority as physical health.”
Government needs to ‘pull services out of a doom loop’
Mental health staff in the NHS were dealing with “some of the most challenging care needs there are”, she added, and they deserved not just gratitude, but “concrete support and training” in “well-staffed workplaces”.
Instead, many faced a “vicious cycle” of staff shortages and worsening morale.
Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of industry group NHS Providers, said that hospital leaders were “deeply concerned about levels of unmet need, particularly for children and young people.”
As well as staffing, officials needed to invest in buildings to “increase capacity in the face of growing demand” and to improve the therapeutic environments patients experienced.
“We also need the right levels of long-term investment in and support for prevention and early intervention services to help tackle growing demand and inequalities,” she added.
“Despite the sector’s best efforts to make progress, too few staff and resources are, as the committee says, holding it back.”