North East NHS executive joins calls for mental health equality
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Just weeks after the Sun announced that three students in every class would be affected by serious mental health issues, the chief executive of the north east’s NHS has pitched in as one of over 200 signatories of an open letter to the government demanding that mental health issues are treated equally to physical ones.
John Lawlor, who heads up the Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust, which provides care for mental health issues and learning disabilities, was among such well-known figures as former Newcastle United manager Alan Pardew and SAFC manager Sam Allardyce. Mr Lawlor, speaking to the Chronicle, said that his aim was to “highlight the very real stigma” associated with mental health and to address issues such as “waiting times, crisis care and the twenty-year gap in life expectancy between people with serious mental health problems and the rest of the population”.
Mr Lawlor also hopes that the campaign will help to “bridge the gap” in public perception of mental and physical health issues as two different and separate things, as well as alleviate the “challenge” of changes in the distribution of funding by the government, which may lead to the Foundation Trust facing between £9m and £12m worth of funding every year. In the letter, other NHS executives share in the message that the use of funding now could save the government millions in the future, including in controlling the damage which has already taken place in what is rapidly appearing as a “crisis” in the mental health states of Britain’s teenagers, with an estimated 75% of children and young people with mental health issues not receiving any treatment at all.
But Mr Lawlor also said that several issues in the letter had already been addressed, chief among which was the partnership which the Foundation Trust had formed with Northumbria Police to prevent people suffering from mental health problems from being kept at police stations, as well as the tendency for patients to be sent to other parts of the country for treatment due to a shortage of beds in local specialist hospitals. The letter also urges the government to show how new initiatives in treating mental health will be implemented and paid for.