Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many mental health staff have left the NHS since 31 May 2018.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
NHS Digital publishes Hospital and Community Health Services (HCHS) workforce statistics. These include staff working in hospital trusts and clinical commissioning groups, but not staff working in primary care or in general practitioner surgeries, local authorities or other providers.
In England, 12,7981 mental health staff left the National Health Service between 31 May 2018 and 31 October 2018, headcount.
The figure above provides the widest possible view of the mental health workforce available from NHS Digital and includes:
- All staff in mental health, learning disability and care trusts;
- Psychiatry doctors;
- Nurses specialising in ‘community psychiatry’, ‘other psychiatry’, ‘community learning disabilities’, ‘other learning disabilities’
- Staff with a primary area of work of ‘psychiatry’, for example a paediatrician whose primary area of work is ‘psychiatry’.
Data for Chesterfield Royal Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is not available on the Electronic Staff Record and therefore, not included in the figure above.
Note:
1Source: NHS Digital, NHS HCHS workforce statistics.
Asked by: Paula Sherriff (Labour - Dewsbury)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many (a) posts and (b) vacancies were there in mental health NHS trusts in England in the most recent month for which data is available.
Answered by Jackie Doyle-Price
The most recent data reported in Q2 2018/19, as at the end of September 2018, shows that in mental health National Health Service trusts there are 190,185 whole time equivalent (WTE) workforce staff in post, with 19,889 vacancies. This is a vacancy rate of 9.5% out of a total workforce establishment (210,074 WTE).
There are 53 mental health NHS trusts, defined as those with over half of their outpatient activity in mental health specialties. Not all staff in these trusts provide mental health services and some mental health services are provided by other trusts.
NHS Improvement collect vacancy rates from individual NHS providers and publish them as part of their ‘Quarterly performance of the NHS provider sector’ report. NHS Improvement defines a vacancy as the current workforce gap between current substantive staff in post and the required staffing level for the respective period.
NHS Improvement count staff working substantively within a designated mental health NHS trust in England as one definition of the size of the mental health workforce. Currently, there is no single agreed way to count the entire mental health workforce. The Department, working together with NHS Digital, Health Education England, NHS Improvement and NHS England, are in a process of agreeing a new definition to count the mental health workforce in NHS trusts and clinical commissioning groups.