Denis Campbell of The Guardian reports:
The number of specialist mental health nurses has fallen more than 10% over the past five years, the Guardian has learned, putting the care of rising numbers of patients at risk.
The loss of one in 10 of the entire mental health nursing workforce in England has occurred mainly in hospitals and mental health units treating some of the sickest patients, official NHS figures show.
Figures from the NHS’s health and social care information centre, obtained through a parliamentary question, show that the number of qualified nurses working in psychiatry dropped by 10.8% from 41,320 in 2010 to 36,870 in 2015.
Of course, here in Norfolk and Suffolk, we know the devastating impact on the quality of care caused by cutting doctors and nurses at Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust (NSFT), which now has a recruitment crisis and languishes in Special Measures.
Here is what happened to nurses at NSFT:
Here is what happened to doctors at NSFT:
Tomorrow, duplicitous Norman ‘mental health champion’ Lamb will appear on television to announce the results of a Freedom of Information Act request showing that Serious Incidents (SIs) in mental health have risen by more than thirty per cent in the last three years. Norman Lamb was the Minister of State at the Department of Health directly responsible for mental health as budgets were cut, doctors and nurses lost their jobs, service users lost their lives and his local mental health trust went into Special Measures. Why didn’t he do anything about it while he had the ministerial car and office?
Click on the image below to read the article in full on The Guardian website:
Insightful piece
Outstanding feature