Children’s Mental Health Week — House of Commons, 2020-02-06
Topic: Health
Nadine Vanessa Dorries (Conservative, Centre-right): As I explained, we have the trailblazer schemes—we are putting fully qualified, dedicated mental health workers into schools. I imagine that some of the schools in the hon. Member’s constituency will be beneficiaries of that, so the responsibility will not be with the teachers; it will be with the mental health workers. I absolutely take her point: teachers have a huge amount to do. I will check with my officers which schools in the Birmingham area have trailblazer schemes and whether they are due to go in to help her. She described her area as having 500 young people waiting, so I am sure that it is very much on the list. I will also check with Claire Murdoch at NHS England, which is responsible for delivery. It is quite interesting that whenever I say to constituents in my surgery, "The Government provide the money and the policy but NHS England is responsible for delivery," they say to me, "Who are NHS England? I don’t know who they are. You are the Government." However, it is responsible for delivery so I will check with Claire Murdoch what is happening in the hon. Member’s area and where the trailblazer schemes are going Mental health support teams will be rolled out to a fifth of schools. I am sure that the hon. Member will be pleased to know that the new schools-based service is in addition to existing provision for children and young people with mental health needs. It is in addition to the additional funding that has been given to the care commissioning groups. I will also touch base with her commissioning group. One of my concerns has been that the money that is ring-fenced for children and young people’s mental health is perhaps not always being spent on what it should be spent on, so I will touch base with it. That would also give us a better picture of what the care commissioning group is dealing with. These new plans will significantly increase the availability of mental health support to children and young people and build on existing provision On the workforce, to deliver and spend the money, most of which will go on salaries, we need the people to spend it on to deliver the mental healthcare. We are not complacent about the scale of the workforce challenges associated with achieving the very ambitious plans for mental health services, and making transformation a reality will require significant shifts and innovation in the way in which we deliver our services We have seen promising results from NHS Improvement’s work to improve retention among mental health trusts. I spoke to a group of students recently who were considering healthcare as a future career; they were considering midwifery. We need more midwives. We have a lovely, glamourised image of the role of midwives from the television, from "Call the Midwife" and "One Born Every Minute". People who are considering going into NHS caring professions are looking at the more glamourised areas of care, and I am struggling to persuade people that mental health is a fantastic, rewarding career. We want more mental health nurses. In fact, two weeks ago, I announced that the grant for those who want to work in mental health nursing will be £8,000—they will get the upper tier.[Official Report, 12 February 2020, Vol. 671, c. 10MC.] They will also get assistance with childcare costs. So I ask people who are considering nursing overall as a career please to consider mental health nursing. I know how difficult it is. When I was training to be a nurse, we were offered 12-week placements in maternity or psychiatry, and my entire cohort chose maternity, so I know the challenge that I am up against. We need to increase the workforce, but we need to attract more people to that area Social media was mentioned earlier. In that regard, the NHS holds only part of the answer. We must do more across Government to protect the mental health of our children, and that includes protecting young people against harmful online content. We now know more about the impact of social media platforms on the health and wellbeing of our young people, and the need to manage the detrimental impacts. The scale of the challenge that we face in protecting children online is vast. That is why the chief medical officer commissioned an independent review of the evidence, and gave advice about setting boundaries for children and young people online. The Government’s "Online Harms" White Paper sets out a range of legislative and non-legislative measures detailing how we will tackle online harms, and also sets clear expectations for tech companies to keep children safe My right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) mentioned online harms earlier, and he was absolutely right. We face many challenges in our modern society, such as poverty—which was mentioned—as well as online social media and addictions, and many of those challenges filter down and have an impact on young children I am extremely proud of what has been achieved so far in relation to children’s and young people’s mental health. As I said earlier, we have achieved more than any previous Government, including those of my own party. We are increasing funding massively, and we are introducing a whole new service through mental health support teams so that more children and young people than ever before—345,000—will be able to access mental health support. We have made huge progress on putting mental health on the same footing as physical health.