Date: 2023-04-24
Alison McGovern: I thank my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for that intervention, which I am sure the Minister has heard and will respond to. There are three points on which I would really appreciate a response from the Minister. Having met providers of the talking therapies service and having listened to a whole host of professionals and constituents, I have  come to the conclusion that one simple thing is needed to improve our mental health service in the Wirral: we need more staff. We need more people in primary care, especially because it will help to free up our secondary and specialist care. We have to get to people early. At the moment there is a false economy: people cannot be seen when they first present themselves to their GP, so their conditions end up getting worse. We need much more community mental health care in the Wirral. I would love to hear from the Minister what the workforce plan is. How can we get people into counselling and therapeutic roles, so we can get them quickly into a place where they can tackle the problems that people face? We also need much smarter targets. As I have said to the Minister, I have found it exasperating how hard it is to work out what is going on. I know that targets can sometimes create a perverse culture, and we do not want to impose targets that are unhelpful, but it should be a basic feature of our NHS that people who need care are able to know roughly how long they will wait, and that we as politicians are able to judge whether that is appropriate. That is what we do, as constituency MPs, when it comes to every other aspect of the NHS. I am simply asking the Minister for smarter and more visible targets which will help us to improve the quality of mental health support in the Wirral. As I said earlier, most people do not need to see a consultant, so I do not think that the traditional way of doing things in the NHS works. Can we not have a simpler, basic access-to-service mental health target that will work? Finally, let me say something about staff targets in respect of treatments and pathways. The Wirral is a very innovative place for mental health care. We are doing great things with social prescribing, which I invite the Minister to investigate if she does not know about them already. We have developed new partnerships with a host of organisations, targeting young people in particular, and considering how we can use the voluntary and community sectors in much better ways. The Minister may be aware of "Open Door", which has delivered some particularly innovative ways of providing peer-to-peer support. Thinking more about the different kinds of support that are available, how they can help and how they can be delivered in the most cost-efficient way possible is, in my view, an urgent job of analysis for the Department, and I would love to hear more from the Minister about the Government's plans for putting the various different treatments and pathways in place. Ultimately, it comes down to this simple fact about the Wirral: we are not where we should be when it comes to giving people access to support. We need more counselling, and we need more therapeutic staff. I am keen to work with the Minister to try to deliver that.