The number of young mental health care workers who went to do other work “is now greater than the number of mental health care workers who retired,” the statistics office notes. And that while the sector needs a lot of staff.
In absolute terms, the number of unfilled vacancies has almost doubled since 2018. There were about 7100 in the third quarter of 2022. For the first time since 2016, the mental health sector also saw more employees leave for sectors outside healthcare than new employees from other sectors joined. Employees from other branches of care and welfare still approached mental health care. As a result, the number of employees in the sector rose to 103,000.
According to the CBS report, employee satisfaction has decreased slightly. In 2019, 78 were still (very) satisfied with their work, in 2022 this had dropped to 73 percent. This is in line with a slight decrease in the healthcare sector as a whole.