Oh dear Mr Hunt, you are over promising again ....!

The government this week announced a £1.3bn plan to expand mental health services that include details to expand the mental health workforce by 21,000 posts including 4,600 nurses working in crisis care, 2,000 additional nurses, consultants and therapists posts in children's and adolescent mental health services and an extra 2,900 therapists and other therapists to support expanded access to adult talking therapies.

When questioned by the BBC about these plans Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Health, invited people to look at the governments track record. He claimed that there are '6,000 more people in nursing'.

According to NHS Digital the numbers of nurses and health visitors in the NHS has gone up from 280.950 in May 2010 to 285,893 in March 2017. That's 5,057 rather than 6,000.

But not all of this increase is in mental health nurses. Full Fact has checked out the number of mental health nurses and the number of mental health nurses has actually fallen by nearly 5,000 nurses since 2010:



So, an extra 4,600 nurses may get the NHS back to were it started in 2010!

This is similar to the story with GPs - in 2014 the government promised 5,000 extra but below is a chart of the number of full time equivalent GPs over the last 10 years:




So, as Mr Hunt asked, if you do examine the governments record then they are just promising to replace the staff that have already gone!

(PS this is David Browns' own view, is a rant and is not the view of Connecting Care Wakefield or Wakefield CCG)

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