The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) today published the Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2017.

This report carries National Statistics designation and is the sixth statistical report on Mental Health Officers (MHOs) in Scotland to be produced by the SSSC.

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The Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2017 presents information on:

• the number of practising MHOs in post at 4 December 2017, excluding long-term absentees
• MHO trainees, leavers, vacancies and staffing shortfalls
• some key aspects of the work carried out by MHOs in Scotland.

Key points from the report are set out below:

• The number of practising MHOs has increased by 3.2% from 722 in December 2016 to 745 in December 2017.
• The estimated average hours worked by MHOs on MHO duties in 2017 dropped from 17 hours per week to 16 hours.
• The number of practising social workers (ie main grade social workers and senior social workers) working as MHOs remained constant at 10.4% between 2016 and 2017.
• There was an increase in the number of authorities with 22 reporting a shortfall in MHOs. The total additional hours per week required to address shortfalls increased by 14% from 2016 to around 1,470 hours a week in 2017. Assuming an average full time working week is 36 hours, about 41 extra full time exclusive MHOs would be required across Scotland to fully address this reported shortfall.
• Almost 96% of MHOs were based in their local Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP) in December 2017, compared with 67% in 2016.
• As in 2016 the number of trainees who achieved the MHO Award in 2017 (60) was above the average seen in recent years (52).

As a National Statistics product, this publication complies with The Pre-Release Access to Official Statistics (Scotland) Order 2008. The list of people who have pre-release access can be found here.

Data Tables and Charts, and blank Survey Template

Copies of the individual tables and charts in the latest report are no longer provided separately, but now form part of the Mental Health Officer time series data section of the data website (available here). This means the latest data can be viewed as part of the full time series data, some of which goes back to 2005. The tables and charts are available for download in Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) format, and the data tables in non-proprietary Comma Separated Values (CSV) format, individually and together in a compressed ZIP file. The provision of the data in these formats is intended to facilitate its analysis and re-use. Below you can download the blank survey template used by survey respondents to submit their data for December 2017. Please note that this illustrative blank template is in normal Excel 2010 format (.xlsx); the real template used by local authorities was a macro-enabled worksheet (.xlsm).