The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) today published the Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2022.

The Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2022 presents information on:

• The number of practising MHOs in post at 5 December 2022, 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.

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

There were 707 filled MHO posts in 2022, which is 13 more than the 694 in 2021.

• The number of individuals working as an MHO rose from 660 in 2021 to 670 in 2022.
• The overall hours estimated to be spent on MHO duties each week in 2022 was 12,752 the highest since 2016 when we started reporting this figure, the next highest was in 2016 when it was 12,388.
• Between 2021 and 2022 there was a rise of over 9% in the overall hours estimated to be spent on MHO duties each week.
• There was a rise of over 7% in the weekly average hours worked per MHO post.
•  Filled exclusive MHO posts rose by 32 (13.7%) whereas the filled cover MHO posts fell by 21 (31.8%) and there was a rise of 24 non-exclusive posts (5.7%).
• Reported shortfall decreased by 8.2 % from 2,840 to 2,606 hours per week.
• Between December 2021 and December 2022 92 staff left 95 MHO posts.
• here is a long-term trend which has been seen since records began in 2005 of increasing proportions of MHOs located in mental health teams and reducing proportions in non-mental health teams. Two-thirds of MHOs are now based in MHTs compared to roughly two-fifths in 2005. 

 Download (PDF,1.04MB) 

 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 will be updated in August 2023 with the 2022 MHO data. 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 2022. 

If you have any enquiries about this report or any of the associated tables, please contact:

Zara Gall
Tel: 01382 723657
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Tables from The Mental Health Officers (Scotland) Report 2022