The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) today published the Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2020.

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

The Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2020 presents information on:

• the number of practising MHOs in post at 7 December 2020, 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.

Download (PDF, 778KB) 

 The key points from this year’s MHO report are set out below.

• There were 704 filled MHO posts in 2020, which is one more than the 703 of 2019.
• The percentage rise in estimated MHO hours worked was 3.5%.
• A small drop was seen in the estimated average time spent by MHOs from mental health teams on MHO work.
• A rise was seen in the estimated average time spent by MHOs from non-mental health teams on MHO work.
• Exclusive MHOs rose by 6.4%, non-exclusive MHOs fell by 1.9% and cover MHOs fell by 8.6%.
• The estimated amount of MHO hours worked per 10,000 head of population in Scotland has increased from 20.5 in 2019 to 21.25 in 2020.
• Between December 2019 and December 2020 staff left 89 MHO posts, this is five less than the high of 94 in between December 2018 and December 2019.
• There was a decrease in the number of authorities reporting a shortfall in MHOs, however there was an increase in the total number of weekly additional hours required.

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

The  Mental Health Officer time series data section of the data website can be found 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 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 2020. 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 2020