Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary, has announced plans to expand mental health provision with a £1.3bn injection that will see thousands of new posts created. This would be welcome news were it not for the fact that so far Hunt has failed to deliver on pledges that could have improved services.
For a start, the Health and Social Care Act (2012) made it unlawful to discriminate between physical and mental health. So far, regardless of whether it’s financial budgets or service delivery, mental health services have seen no significant improvement.
Indeed, we have seen the opposite; more than 50% of clinical commissioning groups cut their mental health budgets last year. There has been a trend that when the NHS is under financial strain, mental health budgets get disproportionate cuts. All too frequently we have seen health commissioners raid these budgets to plug growing deficits in the acute hospital sector. Hunt has had ample time to correct the chronic underfunding, and with many mental health organisations struggling with his government’s imposed austerity cuts, we would argue that this is too little, too late.
Mental health services are also facing increasing demand. One in four adults experience at least one diagnosable mental health problem in any given year. A leaked report by a government taskforce painted a devastating picture of England’s mental health services, revealing that the number of people killing themselves is soaring, that three-quarters of those with psychiatric conditions are not being helped and that sick children are being sent “almost anywhere in the country” for treatment. The failure to prioritise and ringfence resources for services has led to a crisis in mental health provision in this country.
Article from The Guardian, 1 August 2017