I associate myself with the statements in the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland’s written submission to the committee. There are serious implications for mental health officer resourcing. The proposals involve significant extra work for MHOs, which was of concern to the forum and when it was discussed in a group at council level in Glasgow.
In particular, there is concern about the proposals that a named person must sign up to be a named person. I am not clear whether there have been further developments in the thinking on who the prescribed person would be; our assumption is that that role would fall to MHOs in large part. We quite often have named persons who live in different cities, and our out-of-hours standby service can often give consent to detention at 2 o’clock in the morning—there is no way that a named person could be accessed in those circumstances.
The proposals will certainly involve an extra visit by the MHO. I am concerned that we are having problems retaining MHOs at a national level—the numbers are going down and the national workforce is ageing. In 2011, we had 120 MHOs in Glasgow; in 2013, we had 94. That is during a period when their workload has dramatically increased, particularly in relation to adults with incapacity requirements.
The number of adult incapacity applications relating to the older population has been increasing steadily over the past few years, but it has increased dramatically in relation to people with learning disabilities. Some of that is to do with the self-directed support agenda. Although an impact was anticipated, that impact has possibly been underestimated.
At the point when, if anything, our MHO workforce is in slight decline, our workload is increasing significantly. We need to be very careful with some of the bill’s proposals because I have no doubt that they will add significantly to the workload.
On the proposal that the MHO be required to produce a report at review stage, I wonder whether there is instead scope for amending the forms so, rather than simply including a signature, there is a statement of the MHO’s opinion. If that opinion was put in at that stage, that would go some way to addressing some of your concerns without requiring the significant extra work that would be involved in producing a separate report.
I have concerns that a number of the proposals would have significant workload implications for MHOs.