Luciana Berger – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2016-02-04.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what proportion of the funding for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies services since 2010 has been spent on training and development of people working in such services.

Alistair Burt

All National Health Service trusts are required take account of and involve patients and the public in the way they plan and provide services. Transforming Participation in Health and Care, published September 2013, sets out the legal duties on NHS Commissioners to both involve patients in their own care and to involve the public in the way they commission services. The Commissioning organisation should ensure that providers they commission to provide services have suitable arrangements in place to involve patient and the public.

In addition NHS foundation trusts have specific responsibilities to involve their members and local communities usually through the appointment of Governing Body members. Trusts have their own arrangements as to how they make arrangements to involve their patients, carers and communities. Details of the arrangements would usually be available on the trust website.

Health Education England (HEE) has responsibility for training new therapists and high intensity training. In 2015/16, the budget was £22.0 million to support 1,031 trainees. These trainees provide supervised practice alongside college attendance. There may also be some workforce development funding used to further develop people working in such services, however, HEE does not code its workforce development expenditure to the degree of detail to separately identify this.

Data is not collected centrally on the number of psychological therapists employed by the NHS who experienced workplace-related stress in each of the last five years.