Director's introduction
This report gives an independent overview of the operation of the use of legislation to provide care and treatment for people with mental disorders. We have focused on our duties to monitor the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003. We also report on the use of the Adults with Incapacity (Scotland) Act 2000 where there are significant interventions in the health and welfare of people with mental disorders. We provide statistical information on how legislation is used. We also use our knowledge and expertise to comment, where appropriate, on our findings. This has proved important in providing information for the review of mental health and incapacity legislation. Our findings and opinions have helped to change mental health practice for the better and this report contains information on significant improvements - for example, continued falls in emergency detentions, better consultation with named persons and improved services for younger people.
We rely on information reported to us. We greatly appreciate the help we get from medical records departments in hospitals, local authority officers, the Mental Health Tribunal for Scotland and the Office of the Public Guardian. They all have legal duties to report orders and interventions to us and we acknowledge the work involved. However, we know that there are some significant gaps in our information. In particular, we are missing information from the Tribunal on a significant number of cases where compulsory treatment orders have been granted. For this reason we have, where possible, relied on statistics compiled from Tribunal records and reported to us by them. We are grateful for their permission to reproduce these here.
We believe that it would benefit everyone to have a single system to monitor the operation of the 2003 Act. We have recommended to the Scottish Government that the monitoring systems used by the Tribunal and ourselves are merged. This would improve reporting and reduce the time spent by both organisations on the transfer of information. It would also simplify reporting requirements for NHS Boards and local authority staff. Work has started on this and we await the outcome with interest.
[This is the last overview report that we will publish in paper form. We will continue to publish an annual report. In future the information in this report will be published in a new area on our website. The MWC 'report hub' is available this year and will provide an easy point of access to future monitoring data. Visit http://reports.mwcscot.org.uk to view data on-line.
None of this would be possible without the expertise and diligence of our staff. I wish to record my thanks to all our administrative, information, database and communications staff for their assistance in producing this report.
