Director's introduction
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This report gives an independent overview of the operation of the use of legislation to provide care and treatment for people with a mental illness, learning disability or other mental disorder. 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 with a mental illness, learning disability or other mental disorder.
We provide statistical information on how each piece of 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 and the development of policy.
This year, we have found that the number of new compulsory orders continues to fall. We are pleased to see that fewer people are detained under emergency orders, although the fall is much greater for men than for women. The number of existing long-term orders is stable with about a third of people now being treated in the community instead of in hospital. We think this is good news and shows that the principle of least restriction is having an effect.
We have had an increase in reports of admissions of people under 18, especially males, to adult wards despite the Government's commitment to reduce such admissions. Also, we have concerns about young people with learning disability who are on indefinite welfare guardianship orders with no guarantee of a legal review.
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 Scottish 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.
The production of this report would not 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.
If you would like a printed copy of the monitoring report download a pdf of our Annual Monitoring Report 2008-09.
