Meeting of the Parliament 12 January 2022
I thank the minister for his not-so-brief intervention. I agree with him that, if community link workers can act almost as translators between practitioners and the public and patients, they will be doing a huge service.
We must focus on the multidisciplinary teams that will be created. They are to be welcomed and encouraged, but many of the blockages that I have talked about are a result of poor levels of recruitment into existing posts. Although I welcome the Government’s commitment to expanding the numbers of mental health link workers, I wonder where they will be recruited from.
By 2026, every GP practice will have access to mental health and wellbeing services, but that will require more than 1,000 new recruits, and I look forward to finding out more from the Government about how it will find that capacity. We need to focus not just on retention and recruitment; we must also ensure that we avoid redeployment. The borrow from Peter to pay Paul approach to staffing across the NHS is ultimately unsustainable, as the Royal College of Psychiatrists has conceded.
We must address staff morale. As Alex Cole-Hamilton’s amendment says, staff are worn out and burnt out. We have asked everything of them and more, and urgent action needs to be taken on that.
It is time to tackle the postcode lottery in mental health services, to ensure that the new services are fully defined, accessible around the clock, whenever possible, and consistent and comprehensive.
Fundamentally, we need to ensure that we tackle the low-level mental health problems that, left unchecked, often escalate, sometimes to crisis solutions. According to Public Health Scotland, socially disadvantaged people have an advanced or increased risk of developing mental health issues, so we need to be sure that multidisciplinary professional teams are plugged into the primary care process; that they are qualified in areas such as relationships, family circumstances, the effects of poor housing, disability and unemployment; and that they can provide support for people’s personal finance issues, drug and alcohol misuse, grief and trauma, problems with prescription drugs and other forms of dependency.
I believe that there is cross-party consensus that we must do more to tackle the mental health crisis that we face. As we have all seen from the helpful briefings that we have received in recent days from the royal colleges, charities and community groups, there is no lack of support and no poverty of ideas as we set about doing that.
The challenge for the Government is to take the crisis seriously, to address it urgently, to get in place new and additional trained staff—