The mental health workforce in the community: a comparison of national Community Psychiatric Nursing and Approved Social Work survey results

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Abstract
In the past it has not been possible to compare the distribution and workload of two of the main professional groups providing mental health care in the community, community psychiatric nurses (CPNs) and approved social workers (ASWs) because no adequate national data were available. Two recent surveys permit a limited degree of comparison between the characteristics of the two national workforces and the present paper summarizes the comparison which can be made from the two different data sets, in terms of the numbers of staff and rates per head of population, number of clients seen, caseload variations and training. Training for, and provision of, out‐of‐hours services by ASWs are more uniform, but there is much less variation per head of population in the numbers of CPNs than ASWs across the UK. The CPNs are almost certainly working with more people with serious mental illness. There is some suggestion, which needs further research, that, in numerical terms, there might be an element of substitution of one discipline for another in different regions of the country.

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