Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of mental health staff that have left the NHS since June 2017.

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, 23,686¹ mental health staff left the National Health Service between June 2017 and 31 May 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”; and

- 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.

¹Source: NHS Digital, NHS HCHS workforce statistics.