NHS England pledges £1bn a year to improve mental healthcare

The announcement – on 15 February – came in response to the final report of the independent Mental Health Taskforce established in March 2015 by the NHS as part of its Five Year Forward View. Titled Five Year Forward View for Mental Health, the report gives ‘a frank assessment’ of the state of current NHS mental healthcare – emphasising that ‘annually, mental ill health costs the economy, the NHS, and society, £105 bn’. Its recommendations include a ‘three-pronged’ approach to improving care – through prevention, the expansion of mental healthcare – including ‘seven-day access in a crisis,’ and ‘integrated physical and mental healthcare’.

The Taskforce suggests, ‘and the NHS accepts’, the need to invest over £1bn a year of additional funding in NHS care by 2020/21 to reach one million more people – in addition to the previously announced new funding for children, young people, and perinatal care.

With the number of referrals to CAMHS services rising five times faster than the growth of the corresponding workforce between 2013/14 and 2014/15, the Taskforce says the £1.4 bn (over five years) committed for children and young people’s mental health ‘should be invested to ensure that by 2020 at least 70,000 more children and young people have access to high quality care’. Meanwhile, with only half the country offering ‘24/7’ community-based mental health crisis services, new funding should be made available ‘so that by 2020/21 Crisis Resolution and Home Treatment Teams (CRHTTs) can offer intensive home treatment as an alternative to acute inpatient admission in each part of England’.

The Taskforce added: “New funding should ensure that by 2020/21 no acute hospital is without all-age mental health liaison services in emergency departments and inpatient wards, and that at least half of acute hospitals meet the ‘core 24’ service standard.”