Mental health staff have raised concerns with their bosses about the growing number of people needing their help in Cambridgeshire.
Major resource issues are affecting Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT), a meeting heard.
The trust is responsible for Fulbourn Hospital and the Cavell Centre in Peterborough, and provides mental health services and other social care across the county.
At a board of directors meeting last Thursday (May 22), Holly Sutherland, chief operating officer, said teams had voiced concern about the rise in the number of people needing care.
She said they were working to fill vacancies and looking at how they could move staff around the county to share resources 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 “putting in place mechanisms to optimise and support staff”, but accepted it was a challenge.
Eileen Milner, chair of the board, said the trust was “doing the best with what we have got”, but recognised it was “hard for staff and not good enough for 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.
“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 was “very resolved” to do something about it.
She noted that the current increased oversight from the Integrated Care Board, which gave it increased funding to cut its deficit earlier this year, was consuming time and resources.
Scott Haldane, the interim chief executive, said while it was “important” to devote time to what was being asked, a lot of management time was taken up by this oversight.
He said it was “frustrating” at a time when the trust was putting a “great deal of time and effort into responding” to what was being asked of it and in providing data, without any “sense of momentum” to move forward.
