Psychological Professions

Psychological Professions Census Letter 2024

The Psychological Professions Workforce plan for England (December 2021) set out an ambitious but achievable programme to turn the NHS Long Term Plan ambitions into a lived reality for service users, families, and carers. The plan identified five strategic priorities: to grow the workforce; develop career paths; diversify the workforce; develop local, regional and national leadership; and to transform by embracing new ways of working. This commitment is reiterated in the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan which sets out an ambition to grow this workforce by a further 24,000 - 26,000 WTE psychological professionals, approximately a further 100% growth from the ESR baseline at the time of publication of the LTWP.

The purpose of the census is to provide a comprehensive profile of the psychological professions workforce to support the delivery of national workforce strategies and build on the success of the 2023 census. It will provide details of the size of the workforce for each profession as well as profiling its diversity in terms age, gender, disability and ethnicity.

The scope will include staff working within the NHS (mental health, acute and community trusts), independent, voluntary and local authority sectors in England. Note it excludes staff working in NHS Talking Therapies services as these staff will be collected via the NHS TTad census and aggregated into this census to provide a comprehensive profile of the workforce.

Participants will receive a bespoke report outlining key messages and metrics, which compare local data against nationally reported positions.

2025 resources coming March 2025.

2025 data collection template coming March 2025.