Meeting of the Parliament 06 January 2015
I begin by addressing a couple of the points that Jim Hume made. We support the Government’s motion because of the level of interest that the Government has shown in mental health and its level of commitment to tackling the issue. I rightly went through the commitments that were made in the mental health strategy. Although those commitments have not been achieved, I look forward to their being achieved; I was simply reminding the minister of what we seek. Nevertheless, I welcome the progress that has been made in improving mental health, and I look forward to further progress being made. It is not a huge motion, but I do not think that we are in a position to be churlish. We have a new minister—the debate is Jamie Hepburn’s first outing as minister—and I think that much more work can be done.
Jim Hume called for parity in the treatment of mental ill health with the treatment of physical ill health. I refer him to a statement that Earl Howe made at Westminster on 19 December that set out various new waiting targets. However, I want to use my time to talk about what is being done here, rather than about what the Westminster Government is doing, because it is a very short debate. If I have not covered everything that Jim Hume expected me to cover, that is not because I am not committed to improving mental health; it is due simply to a shortage of time.
Although the debate has been short, it has been an important one. I thought that Linda Fabiani made very good points on the joined-up approach and I liked what John Mason said about the use of alternatives to antidepressants, which takes me on to my next point. As others have said, 40 per cent of the GPs who took part in the Scottish Association for Mental Health’s survey said that they had not referred anyone for psychological therapies recently because waiting times were too long. We therefore have a huge hidden waiting list and enormous unmet need, because treatments and therapies that are appropriate for people’s conditions are being ruled out as a result of long waiting times. As Malcolm Chisholm said, although one in three GP appointments relates to mental health, 85 per cent of the GPs who took part in the survey told SAMH that there are gaps in service provision and 90 per cent of them wanted more information on local social prescribing opportunities. If the GPs do not know about social prescribing, the patient cannot possibly be referred to the service. There is certainly work to be done on that.
On criminal justice, commitment 32 in the mental health strategy includes an undertaking to increase effective use of community payback orders, which were introduced in 2010 to help to prevent people from going to prison when what they actually need is mental health treatment and support. We all supported that, yet only 74 out of the 10,000 community payback orders that were issued in 2011-12 included a mental health requirement, so we need to do an awful lot more on that front.
On access to CAMHS, only half of health boards achieved the 26-week waiting time target and only five of 14 health boards achieve the 18-week target. The only mainland board that is achieving the target is NHS Dumfries and Galloway. It is concerning that the target is met only 54 per cent of the time in NHS Grampian and only 50 per cent of the time in NHS Tayside.