Chamber and committees

The full summary of progress made by the Mental Health Strategy 2012-15 has now been published on the Scottish Government website at the following link:

http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Health/Services/Mental-Health/Strategy/MHSSummary

Action 15 in the Mental Health Strategy 2017-27 commits the Scottish Government to 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. To deliver this commitment there will be an additional annual investment reaching £35 million in 2021-22 for 800 additional mental health workers in those key settings.

School nurses are valued members of the nursing workforce and the Scottish Government remains committed to their vital contribution to improving the health and wellbeing of children, young people and families.

NHS Dumfries & Galloway and NHS Tayside advised that those staff who left the school nursing service during the pilot phase did so through retirals and transfers to new positions in another area.

The pioneering school nursing pilots showed that a targeted school nursing role added value to the service through maximising their contribution and effectiveness, and by providing additional support to young people. This includes reviewing initial referrals and redirecting children to other agencies such as Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) if evidence of mental health concerns are identified. In addition, school nurses will work alongside mental health colleagues in CAMHS, Psychology, Education Psychology and other children's services if required.

The existing School Nurse Specialist Practitioner Education Programme is in the process of being revised by NHS Education for Scotland to ensure that future nurses in schools have the enhanced skills to deliver care to school aged children with complex needs. Funding is being provided to support the development of Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for existing nurses working in schools, in areas such as mental health, should NHS Boards and Integrated Joint Boards (IJBs) require to upskill their workforce in light of the refocused role.

The new Mental Health Strategy contains an initial set of 40 Actions. Each action is intended to tackle a specific issue and, in this way, the Strategy will make a positive and meaningful difference to people with mental health issues.

Action 39 of the Strategy commits to establishing a Bi-annual Forum of stakeholders to help track progress on the actions in this Strategy, and to help develop new actions in future years to help meet our ambitions. A key role of each Forum will be to receive reports illustrating progress towards achieving each Action.

I have committed to submit an annual progress report to Parliament, which will summarise this progress towards both individual Actions, and towards the implementation of the Strategy as a whole. We will submit the first annual report in Summer 2018, and see the work that will be undertaken at each Bi-annual Forum as crucial to developing and agreeing the content of each report.

Finally, Action 40 of the Strategy commits to carry out a full progress review in 2022, the halfway point of the Strategy, to ensure that lessons are learnt from actions to that point.

In Scotland the number of people with a diagnosis of dementia - including Alzheimer’s disease - and the number of people dying of dementia has risen as our population ages, and the rates of diagnosis have improved partly due to a greater awareness of getting a timely diagnosis. The Scottish Government commissioned a report last year which assessed, for the first time, estimated and projected annual diagnosed incidence for dementia rising to 20,000 by 2020. Scotland is not alone in experiencing a considerable rise in dementia-related deaths in recent years. In addition, part of the increase is attributable to the introduction by The National Records of Scotland (NRS) of new software to code deaths and adoption of a more recent World Health Organisation (WHO) update to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). This has resulted in some deaths previously assigned to respiratory causes being allocated to dementia. This development brings Scotland into line with Official National Statistics (ONS), therefore making our mortality figures more comparable with those for England and Wales and further afield.

The Scottish Government published a third three year National Dementia Strategy in June, including an enhanced focus on palliative and end of life care. The strategy builds on our progress over the last ten years in transforming services and improving outcomes for people with dementia, their families and carers. It sets out
21 commitments and provides a framework for further action to ensure the realisation of our shared vision for people with dementia and their carers.

The Scottish Government provides funding to a wide range of organisations that provide support for male victims of sexual abuse, both in terms of specific services for victims of sexual abuse and more general victim support services.

Support for Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse

The provision of support services for survivors of childhood abuse is the responsibility of local Health and Social Care Partnerships. However, the Scottish Government works alongside statutory, voluntary and third sector organisations to build greater capacity and capability to address the needs of all survivors. The Scottish Government’s Survivor Support Innovation and Development Fund has made available £1,800,000 for 2017-18. This includes an award of £40,000 to Speak Out Scotland, a voluntary organisation that supports and assists in improving the lives and wellbeing of male survivors of childhood sexual assault. Through the Children, Young People and Families Early Intervention Fund (CYPFEIF), the Scottish Government is providing £25,000 to the Moira Anderson Foundation in 2017-18 to support their work with victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Support for Victims of Rape and Sexual Abuse

The Scottish Government will provide funding of £1,204,000 to Rape Crisis Scotland in 2017-18, which is used to fund 14 local rape crisis centres, a Rape Crisis Helpline and to enable Rape Crisis Scotland to provide a strategic approach to tackling rape and sexual assault. Rape Crisis Scotland provides support services for people who have been raped or sexually abused, regardless of sex or gender – this breadth of service was reflected in their recent “I Just Froze Campaign”, funded by the Scottish Government, to increase public understanding of responses to rape.

Support for Victims of Sexual Exploitation

The CYPFEIF will provide £300,000 to Barnardo’s Scotland in 2017-18 to strengthen capacity to tackle child sexual exploitation in Scotland, including the exploitation of boys and young men. Funding supports awareness raising of child sexual exploitation in both schools and the community, direct support for children at risk of, or who have experienced, child sexual exploitation, as well as helping to progress a number of actions within the National Action Plan to Prevent and Tackle Child Sexual Exploitation.

The Scottish Government will also provide funding of £465,454 to Migrant Help in 2017-18. Migrant Help supports adults who have been trafficked for the purposes of any form of exploitation, including men who have been trafficked for sexual exploitation. The support package provided by Migrant Help includes access to safe accommodation and material assistance, as well as help to access information and specialised care such as medical treatment and counselling. Victims are also provided with access to translation, interpretation, legal services and help to access compensation. Psychological services are provided to victims via the ANCHOR project, which is a service provided by Greater Glasgow and Clyde Health Board and funded via an additional grant payment of £70,000 for 2017-18 from the Scottish Government.

General Victim Support

Funding of £4,217,000 will be provided to Victim Support Scotland by the Scottish Government in 2017-18. Victim Support Scotland provides support and information services to over 200,000 people affected by crime each year, including victims of sexual abuse.

With regard to younger victims, Childline (operated by the NSPCC) will receive £313,200 of funding from the Scottish Government to provide confidential advice and information to children, young people and families affected by all issues, including sexual abuse, and for specific projects to increase access to vital support for children and young people.

Our Independent Advisory Group on Hate Crime, Prejudice and Community Cohesion found that the public are not clear what is meant by hate crime and therefore many instances of hate crime can go unreported. We are working in partnership with stakeholders to develop a campaign which will increase awareness of what hate crime is among victims and bystanders in Scotland, how to recognise it and how to report it.

Once the details of the campaign have been finalised an appropriate evaluation will be conducted and published on the Scottish Government website once available.

This Government is clear that any form of hate crime is totally unacceptable and will not be tolerated. We would encourage anyone who either experiences or witnesses any form of hate crime to report it immediately to the Police either directly or via a third party reporting centre.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information.

This information is not gathered centrally.

Awareness of child and adolescent mental health in schools has been improved by, amongst other things, our commitment to encouraging the establishment of explicit links between schools and child and adolescent mental health (CAMHS) specialists as well as the development of a web-based toolkit (http://handsonscotland.co.uk) aimed at improving the confidence of teachers and others in responding to the mental health needs of children.

We take child and adolescent mental health very seriously. Our new 10-year Mental Health Strategy was published on 30 March, and sets out our vision to improve mental health in Scotland. A key section in the Strategy deals with prevention and early intervention. That section outlines our ambition that every child and young person should have appropriate access to emotional and mental well-being support in school. The very first action in the Strategy commits to a review of PSE, the role of pastoral guidance in local authority schools, and services for counselling for children and young people

The Scottish Government continues to support improved cancer access performance across NHS Scotland.

Our Cancer Strategy commits to investing an additional £2 million per annum in a new Diagnostics Fund to support swift access to diagnostics for people with suspected cancer. The funding announced in June 2017 includes a proportion of funding from the cancer strategy.