The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) today published the Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2019.

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

The Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2019 presents information on:

• the number of practising MHOs in post at 2 December 2019, excluding long-term absentees.
• MHO trainees, leavers, vacancies and staffing shortfalls.
• Key characteristics of the MHO workforce (e.g. age) and the type of teams they work in.

Key points from the report are set out below:

• There were 703 filled MHO posts in 2019.
• There were 27 fewer filled MHO posts in 2019 than in 2018 which is equivalent to a drop of 3.7%.
• The percentage drop in estimated MHO hours worked was 2.3%.
• Exclusive MHOs fell by 2.2 %, non-exclusive MHOs fell by 2.1% and cover MHOs by 18.3%.
• The number of exclusive MHOs unavailable for work increased from 18 to 30.
• The fall from 2016 in the estimated amount of time spent by MHOs on MHO work in Scotland is more than 9%.
• The estimated amount of MHO hours worked per 10,000 head of population in Scotland has decreased from 22.9 in 2016 to 20.5 in 2019.
• Between December 2018 and December 2019 staff left 94 MHO posts, this is more than the 87 in 2018. Over the last two years there has been the highest number of leavers since we started recording leavers in 2012. The next highest was 62 in 2014.

Download (PDF, 778KB) 

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

Data Tables and blank Survey Template

Copies of the individual tables and charts in the latest report will to be made available below later this week .

The  Mental Health Officer time series data section of the data website can be found here (2019 data will be added w/c 17/08/2019). 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 2019. Please note that this illustrative blank template is in normal Excel 365 format (.xlsx); the real template used by local authorities was a macro-enabled worksheet (.xlsm).

Tables from The Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2019