Mental health action plan

Mental Health is a key priority for Health Education England. The Five Year Forward View for Mental Health laid out an ambition to see an additional one million people being treated by mental health services by 2021, including 70,000 more children and young people. We are working with Public Health England, using the emerging findings of the Prevention Concordat that HEE has signed up to, which outlines how we will work with others to increase the focus on prevention and the wider determinants of mental health. We recognise the need for a shift towards prevention-focused leadership and action throughout the mental health and wider system.

As part of this, HEE has produced an action plan which links closely with our recently published mental health workforce plan that sets out how we can make courses on mental health promotion and prevention available to public health staff by 2020/21.

The plan includes a number of recommended actions including:

• developing the public health curricula available,
• encouraging people to take public mental health courses,
• and ensuring the ones that are available align,
• commissioning, accrediting and evaluating public mental health programmes.

Professor Ian Cumming, Chief Executive, Health Education England said

We are pleased to be endorsing this important concordat for mental health. We will endeavour to build the capacity and capability across our workforce to help prevent mental health problems and promote good mental health.

We are committed to supporting local authorities, policy makers, NHS clinical commissioning groups and other commissioners, service providers, employers and the voluntary and community sector to adopt this Concordat and its approach.