Dear Victoria Atkins and Amanda Pritchard,
We are writing as NHS staff members to express our dismay and disbelief at your decision to cut back mental health support for NHS hospital staff from Monday 15th April.
The context to these cuts, as you will be well aware, is one in which levels of psychological distress, depression, anxiety and PTSD among NHS staff have never been higher. One doctor takes their life every three weeks. One nurse takes their life every single week.
This is a national tragedy – and one you should be doing everything in your power to address. During the pandemic – when NHS staff in their thousands risked their lives to save others – you enthusiastically clapped those staff as “heroes”. Can you imagine how hollow and insincere those public displays of support appear now?
The service you have chosen to cut, the NHS Practitioner Health Programme, costs £11 million to run. When you divide that figure per doctor, per year (£11m/186,000 doctors) it equates to just £59 per doctor, per year. Are the mental health and wellbeing of NHS doctors really worth so little to you?
The Department of Health and NHS England should be deeply proud of the Practitioner Health Programme. It is the largest publicly funded mental health staff treatment service in the world, having treated over 32,000 health care professionals since its inception in 2008.
It is also phenomenally successful. Over 90% of professionals treated by the service reach full recovery. Around 75% of those who are not in work when referred to the service return to work after treatment – this equates to around 600 clinicians per year returned to safe, effective clinical practise.
Thus, even if the welfare of NHS staff is of little interest to you – as this decision, sadly, implies – can you not at least appreciate the false economies of failing to care for those who care for patients, such that they burn out, quit or become too unwell to continue working? £11 million is, after all, a mere 0.007% of NHS England’s annual budget.
Without its staff, the NHS is nothing. We urge you to reconsider your decision and to immediately reinstate the Practitioner Health Programme’s full budget. If basic decency doesn’t persuade you to do so, surely the ever deepening crisis in staff retention will do so?
Yours sincerely,
Dr Rachel Clarke, Specialty doctor in Palliative Medicine (GMC 7019426)
Dr Natalie Silvey, Consultant Anaesthetist (GMC 7074933)
April 13, 2024
