Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he had made of the correlation between staff mental health issues and levels of job retention.

Improving the psychological wellbeing of those working in the National Health Service is an essential factor in retaining NHS staff. Therefore, improving psychological wellbeing has been a key focus of the NHS People Plan. An interim version of the NHS People Plan was published on 3 June, setting out the vision for how this will be achieved by creating a new offer for all NHS staff, developed through widespread engagement with our people and staff representatives.

Publication of the final NHS People Plan has been deferred to allow the NHS to provide maximum operational effort to COVID-19 response. However, we have commissioned NHS England to develop a comprehensive emotional, psychological and practical support package for NHS staff during and following the COVID-19 response. Details of the support available as a part of this package are online at the following link:

people.nhs.uk/help