Will the government meet its NHS target? Health Secretary Steve Barclay was asked about this when he did the broadcast round this morning, arguing that even though there were record waiting numbers, the government had successfully reduced the longest waits. But as Fraser wrote this week in his Telegraph column, Rishi Sunak is having to face up to the chance that he might miss this (and most of his other) five ‘priorities’ which he said the British people should judge him against at the next election.
But voters might be paying a little less attention to another area of care where things are visibly going backwards: mental health. When I interviewed former Liberal Democrat health minister Norman Lamb and Tory MP and former mental health minister Jackie Doyle-Price this morning on Times Radio, both felt that the government had dropped the ball somewhat. Both argued that over the past decade there had been huge improvements in access to mental health and that the political establishment had finally been taking its place within the NHS seriously after what Lamb called a ‘conspiracy of silence’. But Doyle-Price added: ‘Actually, we were making lots of progress, but it does seem to have ground to a halt. And I would suspect that’s largely due to the consequences of the pandemic, and as Norman alluded to, the focus is on tackling waiting lists.’ She said: ‘If the Prime Minister and the health sector have different priorities, then it’s going to slip down the to-do list if you like.’
It’s not just about lengthy waits to access mental health care, or patients still having to travel hundreds of miles across the UK for a bed on an acute ward. This week Barclay announced the first ever full public inquiry into mental health in the NHS, putting the existing inquiry into deaths in Essex on a statutory footing. It’s by no means the first inquiry into mental health failings: those stretch all the way back to the Ely Hospital inquiry in the late 1960s. Inpatient settings have changed a fair bit since then (through at a gelatinous pace, with two decades elapsing between ministers saying they wanted to shut down asylums and the first full closure of one). But many of those reports have found the same problems right up to the present day, including staff shortages, lack of experience and a lack of attention paid to keeping suicidal patients safe. Little seems to change.
There is also the not-insignificant matter of the Mental Health Act reform, which has been in the offing since December 2018 when an independent review of that legislation was published. However, that new Bill doesn’t seem close to reaching the statute books. There has been no commitment from ministers to getting it enacted before the next election. This doesn’t just represent a policy failure. It also means that the people who were asked to relive their trauma to the independent review to demonstrate how much the system of treating serious mental illnesses needs to change may feel as though they went through that ordeal for nothing – which is both ethically wrong and also something that risks those patients suffering further mental distress.
Even when governments have been very engaged in trying to improve mental health care, they have found it hard to make much progress. If Sunak isn’t particularly concerned about it as a policy area, it doesn’t have much hope of getting the attention it needs.
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