Meeting of the Parliament 27 November 2019
I will in a second.
I have spoken before about how the strategy was 15 months late, which delayed critical investment. Today, I want to talk about progress in the years since, particularly against action 15 in the strategy. I will read it out to remind members precisely what it says, which is that the Scottish Government would
“Increase the workforce to give access to dedicated mental health professionals to all A&Es, all GP practices, every police station custody suite, and to our prisons.”
My party asked for that and we had discussions about it with Shona Robison and Maureen Watt when they were ministers. In the end, we were promised 800 additional mental health workers in those key settings. Although we disagreed with the figure of 800, we thought that it was at least a start.
However, the Government has now diluted that commitment. The evidence is in the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport’s amendment to today’s motion. The First Minister told me explicitly that the Government had made a commitment and is delivering it, but that is not what was promised. The 800 mental health workers are now going to “a range of” places that merely include
“A&E departments, GP practices, police stations and prisons”,
and the target covers something called “other settings”.