Mental health staff are raising their concerns to health bosses about the growing number of people needing their help in Cambridgeshire.

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) said there are “significant resource issues” and that it is doing what it can to support staff and patients.

The Trust is responsible for the Cavell Centre in Peterborough and for Fulbourn Hospital, but also provides mental health services and other social care across the county.

At a board of directors meeting this week (May 22), Holly Sutherland, chief operating officer, said some of its teams were raising concerns about the increase in the number of people needing care.

She said they were working to fill any vacancies and were looking at how they could move staff around the county to share resources to where there were peaks of demand.

Dr Cathy Walsh, chief medical officer, said there were “significant resource issues”, but said they were trying to make the most of the resources they have and were “putting in place mechanisms to optimise and support staff”, but accepted it was a challenge.

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Eileen Milner, chair of the board, said the Trust was “doing the best with what we have got”, but said they recognised it was “hard for staff and not good enough to those we serve”.

She said: “Certainly there are more people using our services and some people are more poorly than we have had to deal with before and staff are rightly saying to us they feel like it is too much.”

Ms Milner also said some of the services the Trust provides had not received the support it needed in recent years.

She said: “Mental health services and community based services have not received consistent levels of support as they should have done and as was merited over many years, particularly the period since the pandemic, and we are living with the consequences of that in terms of the amount of resource there to service a growing population.

“History will not judge kindly the decisions made in the last couple of years, what we have to do now is say that this cannot continue, we cannot oversee the amount of stress and stretch that sits in the system.

“There are real people impacted by having to wait for access to services they should have more rapid access to.”
Ms Milner said she was “very resolved” to not just acknowledge the demand for services, but to also be doing something about it.

She also highlighted the current increased oversight the Trust is receiving from the Integrated Care Board and said it was consuming time and resources.

Scott Haldane, the interim chief executive, said while it was “important” to devote time to what was being asked, he said a lot of management time was being taken up by this oversight.

He said it was also “frustrating” when he said the Trust was putting a “great deal of time and effort into responding” to what was asked of it and providing data, but he said they did not feel there was a “sense of momentum” to move forward.