Mental health A&E units in England to open
These units will be staffed with specialist doctors and nurses, providing a calm environment for patients who can walk in, be referred by a GP, or the police.
NHS England aims to improve mental health care by offering quicker access to appropriate support, reducing hospital stays, and relieving pressure on busy A&Es, where 250,000 people experiencing mental health crises visited last year.
Ten NHS trusts have already established separate mental health crisis units, with plans to expand the scheme nationally as part of the 10-year NHS plan.
A new mental health unit in Ladbroke Grove, London, ensures that every patient is seen by a mental health specialist within 10 minutes, offering early intervention and connections to community treatment.
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The Independent
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BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
NHS boss says Labour's 10-year plan for NHS is essential
A hospital boss has admitted that NHS services are struggling and said it is essential for the government's new 10-year plan to are being made as part of Labour's 10-year health strategy published today. Nick Hulme, chief executive of East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust (ESNEFT) said: "We are not in crisis yet, but we are in a really, really tricky situation."Part of the shake-up will lead to neighbourhood health services rolled out across the country in an attempt to bring diagnostics, mental health, post-op, rehab, and nursing to people's doorsteps. The plan has put more emphasis on community care and GP surgeries but Mr Hulme, in charge at Colchester Hospital and Ipswich Hospital, said there needs to be funding to go with told the BBC: "We can see full hospitals up and down the country, sadly, with patients still waiting in the corridors. "That is something we might have seen in the winter four or five years ago - we now see it throughout the year. "We know the NHS simply cannot cope with that level of demand with the resources we have at the moment."He said there were significant challenges in A&E and on waiting times. Prevention and support He believes the NHS needs to change what the public can expect from the service and shift the focus away from just purely hospital care. Mr Hulme said frail, elderly, people who still live independently were most likely to be brought into the hospital after a fall or infection. "We know in our communities who is at highest risk at being admitted into hospital."If we get some care and get some prevention and support those families and individuals much earlier it will prevent them coming into hospital for issues that they don't need an acute bed for, " he added. He also said the plan hopes to bring the NHS "into the 21st Century" by encouraging people to use the NHS app and booking appointments electronically. Follow East of England news on X, Instagram and Facebook: BBC Beds, Herts & Bucks, BBC Cambridgeshire, BBC Essex, BBC Norfolk, BBC Northamptonshire or BBC Suffolk.
The Guardian
an hour ago
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Thursday briefing: Labour is betting on an NHS overhaul to deliver real change, but can they pull it off?
Good morning. Wes Streeting's first statement as health secretary was a startling one. Just a day after Labour's historic election triumph, he declared that 'the NHS is broken'. Now, almost exactly a year later, he returns with a 10-year plan to fix it, in what's been billed as the most ambitious health reform agenda in a generation. It's hard to overstate the significance of this moment. Reforming the NHS was central to Labour's election manifesto, and last year prime minister Keir Starmer made the consequences clear: 'Reform or die,' he warned, and with it, staked the next election on his government's ability to deliver meaningful change. NHS leaders, unions, thinktanks, patient groups and other key stakeholders may not agree on every detail, but they are united on one thing: the NHS is in crisis and change is urgently needed. But what exactly is in this plan and will it make a difference? 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'The 10-year plan is meant to get the NHS back on its feet in a way that we as patients, voters and taxpayers will appreciate and notice, but crucially, to also modernise the health service, to make it work better and more efficiently to help deal with the fact that we live in a tech-driven age, with an ageing population and the fact that people expect health care to be much more convenient in the way that so many things in life are now,' Denis added. How will it do this? The 10-year plan proposes to do this with three big 'shifts': From hospital-based to community-based care: Services are moved out of hospitals and into community settings like GP surgeries, clinics and the promised new neighbourhood health centres. From analogue to digital: Rely more on digital tools like AI to spot problems early, speed up diagnoses and improve efficiency. From treating illness to preventing it: Focus more on keeping people healthy – by tackling smoking, obesity and misuse of alcohol – instead of just treating illness when it occurs. But, Denis told me, there are many practical questions, particularly on the first shift: 'What will these new centres actually look like? Will they be new places or expansions of existing GP practices? Who will staff them? Is there any money behind this bold vision to make it a reality?' On staffing, the NHS workforce continues to grow in England. 'There are 1.5 million people, but the NHS in England has for many years had roughly about 100,000 vacancies at any one time. So we know the NHS in England does not have the staff it needs already. 'The government is unveiling an ambitious and potentially voter-friendly plan to make the NHS more accessible, responsive, convenient and patient-friendly, with lots of consumer friendly positive language like this,' Denis said. 'But we do have to ask the hard question: if there isn't enough people hired to do what the NHS already does, where will the extra people come from to provide these extra services?' Denis added that while there has been some progress that the 10-year plan can build on, there's still a crisis to accessing care. 'Too many people wait too long. So there's clearly a big job to be done here to make the NHS as accessible as the government is saying,' he said. What has the reception been so far? Denis was being inundated with responses from thinktanks, unions, patient groups, and other stakeholders when I spoke to him. 'Many are welcoming the boldness of the government's vision, but they're questioning the practicality of delivering all of this and the timescale, what will it take to do this?' 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