Strategies to boost the mental health and learning disability nursing workforce

Nursing continues to be the most significant area of workforce shortage in the NHS. It is important to stress that, over the past 10 years, only adult nursing and children's nursing have seen modest increases in full-time equivalent numbers, while numbers in mental health and learning disability nursing are all lower than they were in June 2010.

Although the ongoing pandemic is exposing gaps in the overall NHS workforce, two reports, one from the Health Foundation (Buchan et al, 2020) and another from the Nuffield Trust (Palmer et al, 2020), warn of future difficulties in ensuring that there are sufficient numbers of mental health and learning disability nurses. Furthermore, the Health Foundation has revealed that in every English region there is a higher than average proportion of mental health nursing posts left unfilled.

According to the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), the learning disability nurse workforce has plummeted by over 40% over the past decade (Launder, 2019). The data show that the number of learning disability nurses working for the NHS in England dropped from over 5500 in September 2009 to 3244 in February 2019 (Launder, 2019).