NHS 111 Helpline to Offer Mental Health Support

File photo of staff on a NHS hospital ward, on Jan. 18, 2023. Jeff Moore/PA Wire

The non-emergency NHS number, 111, will now offer mental health support to those in crisis, including children, the NHS said on Tuesday.

Call handlers will be able organise in-person community support for patients or facilitate access to alternative services “such as crisis cafés or safe havens which provide a place for people to stay as an alternative to A&E or a hospital admission,” the NHS said in a statement.

Previously, local health systems had their own separate phone lines to deal with these kinds of medical issues—taking around 200,000 calls per month—so this is the first time there will be a central service to triage mental health needs in England.

Claire Murdoch, NHS England’s director for mental health, said the changes would help people by giving them a single point of contact to access support.

Murdoch said, “The new integrated service can give people of all ages specialist mental health support and ensure they can be offered face-to-face support in a safe and therapeutic environment.”

Minister of State for Care Stephen Kinnock said the move forms part of the new Labour government’s “plans to help fix the broken health system.”

“We want to ensure we give mental health the same attention and focus as physical health,” Kinnock said.

NHS 111 is a service allowing patients to get advice in non-emergency situations and is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Call handlers can refer patients onto other services, including A&E, or send an ambulance if the situation is serious.

Pressures on the Service

The move was welcomed by mental health charities including Rethink Mental Illness, with its Chief Executive Mark Winstanley saying he hopes it “will make it simpler for people to access the help they need.”

But Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, a membership organisation of NHS trusts in England, said that while any measures to help the record number of people with mental ill-health were welcomed, “trusts remain deeply concerned about levels of unmet need for those seeking mental health care with the latest national data showing over 350,000 children and young people and almost 250,000 adults are waiting for treatment from community mental health services.”

“They also know that demand and persistent pressure on NHS 111 services, many of which are run by already stretched ambulance services, is much higher than before the pandemic,” Cordery said.

Worsening Mental Health

Labour had pledged in its election manifesto that it would improve mental health support, both in the NHS and through schools, saying, “Britain is currently suffering from a mental health epidemic that is paralysing lives, particularly those of children and young people.”

The party’s then-shadow health minister, Wes Streeting, had also acknowledged the connection between the COVID-19 lockdowns and worsening mental health among children, saying in June that young people had seen their mental health “corrupted by lockdown.”

“Teenage boys in particular are not seeing their mental wellbeing return to normal as they mature. We surely do not yet know the true scale of the damage done to our children,” said Streeting, now the secretary of state for health and social care.

In a July report on children and young people’s services, NHS Providers said that trusts were “still struggling to meet rising demand. For instance, 5.3 million children and young people were in contact with mental health services in 2023/24 - up by 8.1% compared to 2022/23 and 25.7% compared to 2021/22.”

Trust leaders had said that the increase in the severity and complexity of children and young people presenting to mental health services has several causes, notably “the long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, including the impact of lockdowns on health and wellbeing, in-person education, and contact with public services; cost of living pressures and inequalities; and wider societal shifts such as access to smartphones and social media.”

Mental Health and Universal Credit

Mental health issues in adults are also affecting the labour market and public spending.

Data from the Department for Work and Pensions in March showed that 69 percent of benefits assessments recorded behavioural and mental disorders.

Christopher Rocks, the lead economist for the Health Foundation think tank, said that “ill health is driving the rising number of people on out-of-work benefits, and damaging the economy, so it’s crucial to understand the health challenges faced by people claiming Universal Credit.”

The Resolution Foundation think tank said in April that Universal Credit will need to change because its design did not anticipate the steep rise in the number of people with ill health or disabilities.

Around 2.3 million claimants are out of work because of ill health, almost double the figure when Universal Credit was introduced in 2013.