Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-03-21.
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of changes to Health Education England funding on training in (a) child psychotherapy, (b) clinical psychotherapy; and on the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme.
Ben Gummer
Higher Education training in child psychotherapy, clinical psychotherapy and Improving Access to Psychological Therapies is not currently eligible for NHS Bursary funding and, as such, is not subject to the healthcare education funding reforms.
The Government will be consulting shortly on healthcare education funding reform as announced in the November 2015 Spending Review and respondents to the consultation may wish to raise issues relating to courses operated outside of the remit of these reforms. The Government will consider these in the context of its consultation response.
Health Education England (HEE) funding for psychological therapy training is currently determined at a local level based on local need. For 2016-17 HEE will fund those commissions set out in the HEE Commissioning and Investment Plan for 2016-17 which was published in December 2015. HEE’s plans for training child psychotherapists, clinical psychotherapists and Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (low intensity and high intensity practitioners) remain unchanged from 2015-16, with 43, 526 and 946 proposed commissions respectively.
