Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to improve the (a) recruitment and (b) retention of CAMHS practitioners in the NHS.

Under the NHS Long Term Plan, our aim is to grow the mental health workforce, across services for children and young people, and adults, nationally by an additional 27,000 professionals by 2023/24. NHS England and Health Education England are working with local integrated care systems, to confirm plans to 2024, looking across service models, supply, retention and recruitment.

The NHS People Plan and NHS People Promise was published in July 2020 and sets out a comprehensive range of actions to improve staff retention across all sectors. This includes a much stronger focus on staff health and wellbeing, more support for flexible working, and a renewed commitment to tackling inequality.

To support retention, NHS England continues to develop tailored health and wellbeing offers that meet the needs of their local mental health workforce.

Additionally, the NHS Retention Programme is seeking to understand why staff leave, resulting in targeted interventions to support staff to stay whilst keeping them well. This includes enhanced early career support for new graduates, mentoring schemes to support experienced staff to continue their careers, better information and advice on pensions and guidance on supporting staff through the menopause.