You are here: monitoring care & treatment
Monitoring care & treatment
Our role and duties
If you are getting care and treatment for a mental illness, learning disability or other mental disorder, laws and safeguards are in place to help make sure your treatment is legal and safe.
We check that professionals are working within the law and that individual treatment is safe and in line with good practice.
What do we monitor?
We monitor the Mental Health (Care & Treatment) (Scotland) Act 2003 and the welfare parts of the Adults with Incapacity Act 2000. For more information on these laws visit our advice & information section.
The law says that the people providing care and treatment must let us know if a person has been:
- detained under the Mental Health Act
- detained without the consent of a Mental Health Officer
- placed under a compulsory treatment order
- given care and treatment that is not in line with his or her advance statement
or if
- a compulsory treatment order has been changed in an important way
- a welfare guardian has been appointed to make decisions on another person's behalf
What do we do with the information we receive?
We check the paperwork we receive and let the professionals responsible and the person concerned know if we think there is a problem. If our monitoring work shows up a serious problem we might follow this up through with a visit or an investigation.
We pull together and analyse the information we receive to create a picture of how these laws are being used regionally and nationally. We publish general information on trends and provide data that allows health boards and local authorities to compare their use of the law against other parts of Scotland. We also have monitoring priorities which allow us to explore and produce reports if we have concerns about the care and treatment of a particular client group. These monitoring reports identify any issues with the way the law is being used. We highlight these issues — and any changes we think need to be made — to policy makers and service providers.
-
All of our annual monitoring data for 2007-08 can be found in our ReportsHub.
