Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-04-18.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what progress has been made on improving women’s mental health since the publication in 2010 of Working towards women’s wellbeing: unfinished business.
Alistair Burt
The Department’s mental health policy teams provide strategic policy advice on mental health for people of all ages and genders. When issues are specific to a gender these are addressed within the policy development.
The Coalition Government published a national mental health strategy No Health Without Mental Health in 2012 which addressed mental health issues for the whole population, and introduced the concept of parity of esteem for mental health. This Government continues to hold NHS England to account through the NHS Mandate for the achievement of measurable progress towards the parity of esteem for mental health.
The Government announced almost £1 billion of additional investment for mental health in January 2016 including £290 million of new investment over the next five years to provide mental healthcare for new mothers. The Mental Health Taskforce Report published in February 2016 set out a recommendation for NHS England to ensure that by 2020/21 at least 30,000 more women each year access evidence-based specialist mental health care during the perinatal period. The recommendation stated this should include access to psychological therapies and the right range of specialist community or inpatient care so that comprehensive, high-quality services are in place across England.
