News
Mental health research gets £70 m DH funding
The Department of Health is to put £816 million in funding into research into key areas including mental health, dementia, and antimicrobial resistance.
The funding – announced on 14 September – has been awarded to 20 NHS and university partnerships across England through the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). Each of the 20 biomedical research centres will ‘host the development of new, ground-breaking treatments, diagnostics, prevention, and care, for patients with a wide range of diseases like cancer and dementia’. The DH said: “Leading NHS clinicians and universities will benefit from new world-class facilities and support services built by the five-year funding package totalling £816 m – the largest ever investment into health research.”
Jeremy Hunt. Chris Whitty. Mental health research will see funding
increase to nearly £70 m, dementia to over £45 m, deafness and hearing problems over £15 m each, and antimicrobial resistance research £45 m. Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt said: “The UK has so often led the world in health research –
from the invention of the smallpox vaccine, to the discovery of penicillin and the development of DNA sequencing. Today, we are making sure the UK stays ahead of the game by laying the foundations for a new age of personalised medicine. We are supporting the great minds of the NHS to push the frontiers of medical science so that patients in this country continue to benefit from the very latest treatments and the highest standards of care.” Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor Chris Whitty, said: “The future of NHS care depends on the science we do now. This new funding will enable clinical researchers to keep pushing for medical breakthroughs. The NIHR biomedical research centres announced today offer huge potential benefits for patients across the country.”
Programme launched to help new or expectant mothers
The NHS has launched a programme that it says will ‘each year help an extra 30,000 new or expectant mums who experience serious mental ill health’.
As a first step, NHS England is launching a £5 million Perinatal Community Services Development Fund ‘to help close a wide gap in the availability of high quality care for women with severe or complex conditions’;
fewer than 15 per cent of areas currently provide services to nationally recommended levels, and over 40 per cent no service at all. The organisation said: “These specialist community services provide care and support to women with a mental illness in pregnancy or the postnatal period. They also respond to crises, aim to decrease risks to mothers and babies, and offer after-care following an
inpatient stay in a mother and baby unit.” Perinatal mental ill health’s cost to society is estimated at £8.1 billion for each annual birth cohort, or almost £10,000 per birth, while up to one in five women experience mental ill health during pregnancy or in the year after birth. Overall, £365 m has been allocated for specialist perinatal mental health services over the next five years.
THE NETWORK
OCTOBER 2016 7
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