Cambridgeshire mental health staff worried about numbers of people needing help

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

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

At a board meeting this week, Holly Sutherland, the trust’s chief operating officer, said some teams had raised concerns about the rising numbers of people needing care.

Mr Sutherland said staff were working to fill vacancies and the trust was looking at ways to redeploy staff and share resources around the county to cope with peaks in demand, the Local Democracy Press Service reported.

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

She added that the trust was “putting mechanisms in place to optimise and support staff” but acknowledged it was a challenge.

Chair of the board Eileen Milner said the trust was “doing the best with what we have” but recognised it was “hard on staff and not enough for the people we serve”.

She said: “We are certainly seeing more people using our services, some of whom are sicker than we have previously dealt with, and staff have rightly told us they feel overstretched.”

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

Mr Milner added: “Mental health services and community-based services have not received the consistent levels of support they should and should have received over the years, and particularly since the pandemic. We are facing the consequences in terms of the amount of resources available to provide services to a growing population.”

“History will not look kindly on the decisions that have been made over the past few years. What we need to do now is to say this situation cannot continue, that we cannot monitor the stresses and strains that have built up in the system.”

“There are people who are really affected by having to wait to access services that could be accessed more quickly.”