Core mental health standards

6. Context: Pressures facing Services and the Mental Health Workforce

The mental health and wellbeing workforce play a critical part of how we promote positive mental wellbeing, prevent poor mental health or further deterioration in those with existing mental health conditions. The workforce aim to provide safe, effective, timely, compassionate and evidenced-based support, care and treatment where these are required.

Through a continued focus on Fair Work, there has been improvement in workforce recruitment over the years, with record numbers of posts in mental health services. Despite this, the mental health and wellbeing workforce remain under significant pressure. Increased demand for support and services, rising levels of illness severity and ongoing high levels of staffing vacancies are having an impact on the workforce’s capacity to deliver care, treatment and support, and also on their own wellbeing. The impact on the workforce’s wellbeing is leading to higher absence rates and causing retention challenges across the system. This is further exacerbated by the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on the person seeking support and on the workforce themselves. These pressures also impact the ability to attract, train and retain a strong and diverse workforce, which in turn impacts the ability to engage with and deliver long-term strategic planning for the workforce.

We appreciate that implementing these standards within this context will be challenging for services and the workforce. As such, we acknowledge that the ability of services to implement the standards will be dependent on capacity within their teams. Within this context, the standards will take time for services to fully implement: and we will take a phased approach to implementation. Our ambition is that the standards will support services to improve the quality and safety of care, treatment and support they deliver.

We want to continue to work with services, people who work in them as well as people with lived and living experience of using services, to ensure our approach to implementation is as supportive as possible.

We will publish a Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Action Plan setting out the immediate actions, timeframes and allocation of responsibilities for achieving the outcomes, all of which contribute to achieving our vision for the workforce to ensure that everyone experiences the best mental health and wellbeing possible. Given the potential of the quickly evolving landscape to affect demand and delivery, as well as new and emerging research and evidence, the plan will take a phased approach so that progress can be made responsively and incrementally.