The number of specialist mental health nurses has fallen more than 10% over the past five years, the Guardian has learned, putting the care of rising numbers of patients at risk.

The loss of one in 10 of the entire mental health nursing workforce in England has occurred mainly in hospitals and mental health units treating some of the sickest patients, official NHS figures show.



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Figures from the NHS’s health and social care information centre, obtained through a parliamentary question, show that the number of qualified nurses working in psychiatry dropped by 10.8% from 41,320 in 2010 to 36,870 in 2015.



While the number working in community psychiatry services has fallen only slightly from 15,986 to 15,826, those listed as working in “other psychiatry” – mainly hospital units – went down from 25,334 to 21,044.



“These shocking figures raise serious concerns about the future of our mental health services,” said Luciana Berger, Labour’s shadow minister for mental health. “At a time when there is growing demand and staff are being asked to do more for less, cuts to the number of nurses working in mental health are completely unacceptable.”

The sudden drop comes at time when more and more people are seeking mental health treatment from the NHS. Official figures show that the number of people in contact with NHS mental health services has surged by as much as 40% over the same period.

The figures raise questions about the funding of mental health services, whether NHS workforce planning is delivering enough of the staff needed and the former coalition government’s repeated pledge to introduce “parity of esteem” in the NHS treatment received by patients with mental health problems compared to those with physical ailments.

“This loss of so many nurses at such a critical time is putting some of the NHS’s most vulnerable patients at risk,” said Berger. “People are being turned away from services when they need them the most and too many are not getting any support at all.”



The Royal College of Nursing (RCN), the nurses’ union, also voiced concern about a shortfall in the service.

“There are serious questions about how mental health services can be delivered when the number of mental health nurses is still declining,” said Howard Catton, its head of policy and international. “These nurses are the quiet heroes of mental health services, helping people in crisis and keeping people as well as possible.”

The fall may be even greater than Labour’s parliamentary question reveals, though. Research the RCN published last September found that almost 5,000 mental health nursing posts had disappeared since 2010. The difference between its figures and Labour’s are thought to be down to the dates covered by the figures, given that many newly qualified nurses join the NHS every October. The RCN is concerned that, while an extra 100 mental health nurses are now being trained every year, there are still too few to cope with the growing demand for the care that they provide.



Other RCN research from earlier this month, showing that London hospitals had 10,000 nursing vacancies, found that NHS mental health trusts were among those worst affected by the shortage of nurses. The South London and Maudsley trust, England’s largest specialist provider of mental health care, has 440 vacant nursing posts, representing more than one in four (26%) of its total complement of nurses. Similarly, the West London mental health trust is short of 242 nurses – 22% of its headcount.



Berger urged ministers to urgently review plans to abolish bursaries for student nurses in the light of the figures. Removing them, she warned, would “only exacerbate staff shortages and put further pressure on a mental health system already in crisis”.



Bursaries are being abolished as part of the Department of Health’s (DH) plan to boost NHS England’s budget by £8bn by 2020-21 by cutting the budgets of non-frontline NHS organisations such as Health Education England (HEE), which looks after staff training and education, and Public Health England. Forcing would-be nurses to take out student loans will save £650m a year from HEE’s budget by 2018-19 and ultimately £1.2bn a year by 2020-21.



The RCN has criticised the DH’s “ill-thought-out” plan, which it has warned will worsen the NHS’s already chronic shortages of nurses by forcing recruits to start taking on significant debt.

