Mental health transformation plan limited by nurse numbers

Ambitious NHS plan fails to acknowledge 'workforce hill we all must climb'

With little fanfare, the NHS published a plan this summer for ‘the most ambitious transformation of mental healthcare England has ever known’.

True, it’s hard to get a word in edgeways in the news these days, but even so this announcement was covered by a handful of trade publications only.

It may be difficult to argue with the optimism surrounding this 'transformation', but mental health nurses dealing with endemic vacancies on their acute and inpatient wards could be forgiven for thinking this is a case of pie in the sky.

So can we glean anything from the report, published in July, to help distinguish fact from fiction? What will services provided by mental health nurses