Is mental health breaking the NHS?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2019

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Once more the NHS is at the heart of a general election campaign and politicians on all sides are promising to improve the health service. With more than four million patients on the NHS waiting list and delays in A&E at their worst level since records began, many people believe the health system in struggling. But, what's not as widely talked about is the way the service is dealing with the growing number of people needing treatment for their mental health. In this episode we speak to Ellen Welch, a general practitioner who’s written a book about the history of the NHS and to Catherine Renton, a patient who has been on the NHS waiting list for mental health treatment for 18 months. We also talk to trainee junior doctor Samara Linton about her experiences of working on the front line at a NHS psychiatric unit, and why she thinks it’s not just the public’s mental health that is suffering. If you feel affected after listening to today’s episode, you can get help by going to our website: https://www.bbc.co.uk/actionline/ Presenter: Matthew Price Produced by Seren Jones Mixed by Nico Raufast Editor: John Shields

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:05.0	Hello, I'm Matthew Price. This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.
0:11.0	Every day we ask one big question about one big story.
0:14.0	Today is mental health breaking the NHS.
0:27.0	About a year ago I was spending an awful lot of time on the telephone to the NHS
0:36.4	trying to get through to the right people because my wife was struggling with
0:40.7	depression and we needed to get her to see someone quickly.
0:47.3	And it took me ages to find the right person to talk to it, it took me ages to get the right support for my wife and I was thinking if I as a journalist you know it's
0:57.8	our jobs to be resourceful to get through to the people that we want to talk to and to ask them the right questions. If I was
1:06.6	struggling to do that, what the hell was that like for people who aren't used to
1:12.0	picking up the phone and trying to find the right support, the
1:16.4	right help.
1:18.4	Anyway, in the end, we did get supports and then the next problem was that the doctors and the health
1:24.4	professionals who were assigned to my wife's case they didn't have the right
1:29.1	skills or the right knowledge to deal with her specific problems. Now thankfully we've moved on a bit
1:35.4	from that but we're not the only people who have had this sort of struggle in trying to
1:42.0	navigate the NHS mental health system.
1:45.1	You know, hopefully a lot of people, perhaps even you have had a good experience,
1:51.6	but there's a lot of ways in which the NHS isn't matching our expectations
1:55.9	when it comes to mental health care. Now when there's an election the NHS
2:00.5	is talked about a lot. Politicians make promises, they make promises about how they're going to improve it.
2:05.3	We decided we don't want to go over all that today.
	...

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