Chamber and committees

Scottish Government expects Health Boards and Integration Authorities to ensure adequate mental health care and treatment is available for their populations. This applies to community and hospital treatment. Generally these are provided as locally as possible within the Board / Authority area but there are exceptions where people are treated out of area. The reasons for out of area treatment are generally to allow access to highly specialist regional or national treatment tailored to specific individuals. For inpatients there are occasions where patients require admission out of area due to temporary bed unavailability but attempts are always made to minimise this.

Out-patient activity is reported by ISD. Inpatient activity is also subject to regular ISD reporting and an annual moment-in-time census. Health Boards wishing to use non NHS Scotland NHS beds access these through the National Services Division of NHS NSS who monitor these placements. Health Boards may also wish to use private non NHS facilities but they are not required to report this use on an on-going basis. The Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland is informed of all detained patients and detention certificates include information on the site of admission. Cross Border transfers of detained patients are subject to Ministerial approval.

Beyond this data collection Scottish Government does not intend making the recording of data by NHS Boards on where mental health patients are being treated a statutory requirement.

National Services Division (NSD) funds placements of children and young people with mental health disorders who require specialist care. The following figures are for patients with a mental health diagnosis including autism and learning disabilities who have been admitted for inpatient care. As these patients are categorised as requiring specialist care, this does not distinguish between forensic and non-forensic:

2014-15 - 4 patients

2015-16 – 3 patients

2016-17 – 2 patients

Information about placements arranged by individual NHS Boards or local authorities is not held centrally.

The Scottish Government has committed to recruiting an additional 250 Community Links Workers (CLWs) in practices in deprived areas with 40 in place by September 2017. The rollout will be phased until 2021. CLWs connect people to non-medical sources of support or resources in the community which are likely to help with their health problems. To ensure CLWs are reaching those people most in need, they are equipped to deal with a wide range of issues with a large proportion of their contacts being with people who have mental health issues.

Over the next 5 years the Scottish Government is increasing additional investment to £35 million for 800 additional mental health workers. We will be working with local partners on priorities, service models and types of workers. Some of this investment could go towards more community links workers across Scotland if that is what local needs and arrangements require.

The Information and Statistics Division (ISD) annual report “Prescribing in Mental Health” provides summary information on antidepressant use in Scottish Health Boards. This report is published online, the latest report was published on 4 October 2016 and is available at: http://www.isdscotland.org/Publications/ . Included within the data tables as part of this publication is a breakdown by health board of the number of anti-depressants prescribed from 2005-06 to 2015-16.

The Scottish Government has published “Key Information on the use of Antidepressants in Scotland” which can be found online at: http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0045/00456540.pdf

On 28^th June 2017, I met the Lord Advocate, the Solicitor General and the Minister for Community Safety and Legal Affairs, to discuss Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership’s safer drug consumption and heroin assisted treatment proposals.

Proposals for a combined safer drug consumption and heroin assisted treatment facility are matters for authorities in Glasgow to take forward at this time. Scottish Ministers have encouraged Glasgow’s Health and Social Care Partnership to consult sensitively and robustly with relevant stakeholders and the public as they take their proposals forward.

On 16 June 2017, senior officials from Glasgow’s Health and Social Care Partnership wrote to the Lord Advocate in connection with their safer consumption proposals. A written response to this correspondence will be provided in due course.

In response to Developing the Young Workforce: Scotland’s Youth Employment Strategy, the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) developed a Gender Action Plan (GAP) to address gender imbalance at subject level in colleges and universities.

The GAP was published in August 2016 in partnership with Scottish Government, Skills Development Scotland, and other key stakeholders; and targets, amongst other things, an increase by five percentage points in the minority gender share in each of the 10 largest and most imbalanced college subject groups by 2021.

Colleges and universities have been asked to publish their own GAPs ahead of the new academic year, and these will be monitored annually by the SFC through the Outcome Agreement process, with the SFC due to publish their first annual progress report at the end of 2017.

The ambitions of the GAP are long-term, Audit Scotland noting in their Scotland’s Colleges 2017 report that addressing this issue will take a number of years.

In addition to work on the GAP the Scottish Government is currently developing a recruitment marketing campaign to attract people to train and work in the early learning and childcare sector. Working with a wide range of stakeholders, including colleges and the SFC, the aim is to attract significantly more males into that sector.

Improving gender equality is a priority for this Government and we are addressing the under-representation of girls and women in STEM subject courses and careers. Our STEM Education, Training and Lifelong Learning Strategy, to be finalised later this year, will set out how we will promote greater diversity across the uptake of STEM courses and within the STEM workforce.

We are currently supporting the Improving Gender Balance Scotland Project to challenge gender stereotyping in schools, and help young people make informed career decisions. Through the Developing the Young Workforce programme we are taking an integrated approach across education, training and employment to tackle inequality by enabling all young people to develop a range of employability skills to meet market demand, such as those needed by the STEM sector.

We are taking action to encourage women into technology-related careers. We invested over £1 million into the Digital World marketing campaign and Discover Digital World events to raise awareness of the varied and attractive careers available in ICT, particularly amongst women and young people. Going forward, we will also promote flexible working practices to employers, develop a mentoring framework for those considering, or looking to progress in, a career in tech, and create training opportunities for women career changers moving into the sector.

The Scottish Governments National Unscheduled Care Team is working closely with the local teams across NHS GG&C, including the Glasgow Royal Infirmary (GRI), to support the implementation of the six essential actions work.

We have recently been supporting the team at the GRI to establish a governance structure around the implementation of focussed actions that will support performance to improve; performance did see a significant and sustained dip but this is starting to show improvements. The latest weekly data shows that performance at the GRI against the 4 hour target has improved by over eight percentage points since week ending 2 July 2017, with the latest published weekly stats (w/e 30 July) showing performance at 92.0%. Key actions that have supported this improvement include new processes around patients being admitted to hospital that minimise delays for patients waiting for a bed.

We will continue to support the GRI to ensure sustainable performance going forward.