The Scottish Social Services Council today published the Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2013.

This is the second statistical report on Mental Health Officers (MHOs) in Scotland to be produced by the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC). In previous years this report was collated and published by the Scottish Government and had been assessed by the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) as a National Statistics publication which means that it complied with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. The UKSA have also undertaken an assessment of the SSSC’s first MHO report (published in May 2013). More details about this can be found here.

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Copies of the individual tables and charts can be also be downloaded. Scroll down to find links to all the report's data tables and charts in Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) format, plus all the report's data tables in non-proprietary Comma Separated Values (CSV) format. The CSV files are available 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. Also available for download is the blank survey template used by survey respondents to submit their data for December 2013.

Until 2012 the survey collected information about the number of qualified MHOs who were practising within Scotland on the 31 March. In 2012 the date was changed to December to bring it into line with the collection date used for the annual census of local authority social work services. This change in date means that the data in this report is not wholly comparable with that of previous MHO reports but it is comparable with the annual census.

The Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2013 presents information on:

• the number of practising MHOs in Scotland, in post at 2 December 2013
• the workload carried out by MHOs in Scotland.

Key points from the report are:

• The number of practising MHOs has decreased by 3.4 percent. The decrease is from 698 on 3 December 2012 to 674 on 2 December 2013, the same number as in 2008.
• The staffing whole time equivalent (WTE) has decreased by 1.8%, from 643.2 on 3 December 2012 to 631.7 on 2 December 2013.
• A greater proportion of MHOs are working in specialist mental health teams. MHOs in specialist mental health teams have increased from 359 in December 2012 to 378 in 2013, a rise of 5.3%.
• There is a large increase in the number of exclusive MHO positions which now form nearly a third of the overall workforce. They have increased by 22.2% from 176 in December 2012 to 215 in 2013.
• Women make up over two-thirds of the workforce, and the workforce is ageing. About three-quarters of MHOs are over 44 years old, and one in three MHOs is 55 or older.
• The number of admissions to MHO Award Programmes in 2013-14 was 57, an increase of 16 over 2012-13, and a return to the level of trainee admissions seen in 2010-11 and 2011-12.
• A total of 58 MHOs left the workforce between 3 December 2012 and 2 December 2013, of which about a fifth had a change of post and nearly a quarter resigned.
• The number of MHOs on out-of-hours rota duty is at an all-time low. They have decreased by 12.3% from 106 in December 2012 to 93 in 2013, continuing a steady decline since 2011 when the number was 137.
• The work area category of Adults with Incapacity (AWI) was introduced for the December 2013 census. There were 427 MHOs involved in AWI work in the year up to 2 December 2013, nearly two-thirds of the total workforce.

 Data Tables and Charts, and blank Survey Template

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.