Core mental health standards

1. Introduction

As part of the Scottish Government’s wider work to improve mental health services and care, we have developed new core mental health standards, which stem from the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy. These standards set out clear expectations for what services will provide, whilst recognising the need for local flexibility, and how we will provide assurance of high-quality care. These standards are designed to be aspirational about what good mental health services should look like. We know that many of these standards will already be being implemented by services but we also recognise that some of these may take longer for services to fully deliver in the face of ongoing systems pressures. We are therefore taking a phased approach to the measurement and implementation of the standards (see Annex A). This will include a pilot that will examine the feasibility of implementing the current set of standards which will inform any future refinements.

The standards have been developed in line with the vision of a Scotland, free from stigma and inequality, where everyone fulfils their right to achieve the best mental health and wellbeing possible.

Aims

We want to support secondary mental health services which enable people to receive the right information, support, care, intervention, or service for their needs and to support their recovery, as quickly as possible, with the fewest steps possible.

The aims of the standards for adult secondary services are as follows:

• To let individuals, their families and carers know what they can expect from a secondary mental health service.
• To ensure that person-centred and trauma-informed approaches are embedded within the services.
• To improve experiences and outcomes for people who use adult mental health secondary services.
• To ensure a consistent high quality of service is provided to everyone who needs it. To reduce the scope of unwarranted variation of quality of care.
• To support improvement in and enable measurement of quality in service provision.