Mental health staff fears over number needing help

Mental health staff have raised concerns to NHS leaders about the growing number of people needing their help in a county.

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust said there were "significant resource issues" and that it was doing what it could to support staff and patients.

The trust is responsible for the Cavell Centre in Peterborough and for Fulbourn Hospital in Cambridgeshire, but also provides mental health services and other social care across the county.

At a board of directors meeting this week, Holly Sutherland, the trust's chief operating officer, said some teams were raising concerns about the increase in the number of people needing care.

Ms Sutherland said staff were working to fill any vacancies and the trust was looking at how it could move employees around the county to share resources to address peaks in demand, reported the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

Dr Cathy Walsh, a chief medical officer at the trust, said there were “significant resource issues”, but said the trust was trying to make the most of the resources it had.

She added the trust was "putting in place mechanisms to optimise and support staff", but accepted it was a challenge.

Eileen Milner, the chair of the board, said the trust was "doing the best with what we have got", but recognised that it was “hard for staff and not good enough to those we serve”.

She said: "Certainly there are more people using our services and some people are more poorly than we have had to deal with before and staff are rightly saying to us they feel like it is too much."

Ms Milner also said some services had not received the support they needed in recent years.

Ms Milner added: "Mental health services and community based services have not received consistent levels of support as they should have done and as was merited over many years, particularly the period since the pandemic, and we are living with the consequences of that in terms of the amount of resource there to service a growing population.

"History will not judge kindly the decisions made in the last couple of years, what we have to do now is say that this cannot continue, we cannot oversee the amount of stress and stretch that sits in the system.

"There are real people impacted by having to wait for access to services they should have more rapid access to."

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