The Government’s recent announcement of a major expansion of community mental health support across England represents an important opportunity to rethink how and where people access and receive mental health care.
Backed by £343 million of investment, the plans will see up to 159 new NHS mental health facilities open across England, including 100 community mental health centres and 59 dedicated mental health emergency departments. The ambition is clear: to provide earlier, more accessible support closer to home, helping people before their mental health reaches crisis point.
BAMT welcomes this commitment. But if these new services are to genuinely offer accessible and preventative mental healthcare, Music Therapy must be included and integral in all new developments from the outset.
Music Therapy is included in the NICE Guidelines for mental health treatment. Music Therapists are highly trained Allied Health Professionals, educated to Masters level and regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC). They already work across all levels of NHS care and throughout education and VCSE services, frequently as part of multidisciplinary teams. Music Therapists work across the spectrum of mental health, from anxiety and depression (including post-natal), eating disorders, addiction and drug abuse, post-traumatic stress, phobias, psychosis and schizophrenia. Music Therapy also provides invaluable psychological support for individuals recovering from conditions such as stroke, cancer and other long-term conditions.
Music Therapy is an established psychological clinical intervention with a robust and growing evidence base. Within mental health services, it supports emotional expression, communication, relationships, resilience, quality of life, self-esteem and greater awareness of self and others. Crucially, it provides a route into therapy for people who may find predominantly verbal approaches inaccessible or difficult to engage with. Music transcends language, and this is pivotal in therapeutic settings. This matters when designing services intended to reach and support people earlier and more effectively. NICE guidance consistently emphasises personalised, accessible, psychologically informed and recovery-focused interventions. Music Therapy can complement these approaches by providing a clinically led therapeutic intervention that does not depend exclusively on verbal communication.
Our recent Insight Report, based on an Ipsos survey, demonstrates significant public appetite for this broader approach to mental health support. In an Ipsos survey of 2,173 adults across the UK, 59% believed Music Therapy could help with anxiety, 59% with stress management and 54% with depression. 70% recognised that Music Therapy can provide non-verbal therapeutic support, and 45% said they would be likely to consider using a Music Therapy service.
Yet the same research highlighted an important access problem. Among people unlikely to consider Music Therapy, 33% said they did not know enough about it and 23% did not know where they could access it. Only 31% of respondents identified the NHS as somewhere Music Therapy could be accessed.
The development of a new network of community mental health centres presents an opportunity to change this, and to widen accessibility for Service Users who could benefit significantly from Music Therapy, including those who cannot or do not want to access the “Talking Therapies”.
If these services are intended to offer the right help, in the right place, before people reach crisis, they must provide meaningful choice in how therapeutic support is delivered. Not everyone communicates, processes distress or engages therapeutically in the same way.
Music Therapy provides opportunities for communication, expression and therapeutic engagement that do not depend solely on words. Excluding it from the development of these new services would therefore represent a significant missed opportunity.
BAMT is calling for the government and local commissioners to ensure Music Therapists are included in workforce planning and service design for the new community mental health centres, alongside the wider multidisciplinary mental health workforce.
Chief Executive at BAMT, Andrew Langford, said:
“BAMT welcomes this new model of community mental healthcare for England, but it is vital that Service Users have access to the full range of evidence-based psychological professions available to meet their needs. At BAMT, we will be doing everything in our power to bring Music Therapy to the forefront of these developments. Failing to draw on the profession and its expertise would be a significant missed opportunity to make community mental healthcare more accessible, responsive, and inclusive; that would then improve outcomes and ensure community mental healthcare genuinely meets the diverse needs of the people it serves”
Look out for our petition
BAMT is in the process of setting up a petition calling for the inclusion of Music Therapy in the development of these services. Keep an eye on our social media channels and website for updates on this, and please do sign and share the petition once it goes live in the coming weeks.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------