Meeting of the Parliament 02 April 2014
I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of interests, as I am a fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, honorary professor of psychology at the University of Stirling and a member of SAMH.
I agree with Jackson Carlaw that this has been a useful debate. Before I address it, I will just say that the judgment from the Scottish Information Commissioner on further transparency in relation to NHS Lanarkshire’s mental health services is welcome, as is the minister’s commitment on better data, because transparency on data is vital.
I want to concentrate my comments on child and adolescent mental health services. We all acknowledge the challenge facing all our services, and the Government, in achieving our shared aspiration of good, accessible CAMH services. The Government’s target of 26 weeks and a further reduction to 18 weeks is very welcome. However, the difficulty of achieving that will be quite significant, particularly in relation to psychological services. A number of members have referred to that, and Jim Hume’s fairly forensic analysis was an important contribution.
Jim Hume, Neil Findlay and Nanette Milne reminded us that health inequalities in the mental health field are stark and sometimes unrecognised. As Ken Macintosh and Kevin Stewart said, that is likely to increase in the current economic climate and in response to welfare reform. The issue of mental health is not properly dealt with and not well recognised under welfare reform.
In our amendment, we were referring to tier 4 services. As was mentioned by Nanette Milne and indeed the minister, service redesign is very important in preventing admission—that is welcome in Fife and the Borders and the examples given—but the increase in admissions of children to adult wards, which reverses the previous trend, is a worry. The Government needs to review the cuts in the previously agreed bed capacity for child and adolescent services, because we have not got that quite right.
My colleague Neil Findlay showed the reduction and proposed further reduction in educational psychologist posts and other services in the local authorities against the background of underprovision in clinical psychology.