Leadership Board: First meeting - PHS - Monitoring and Evaluation Paper

Appendix 2: High level theory of change for the Strategy

1. Context 

The Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy is the main Strategy but this sits within a wider portfolio of Strategies. 

• Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy  
  • Parallel strategies and actions plans that impact the wider mental health context and contribute to change 
  • Health and Social Care Workforce Strategy/Mental Health and Wellbeing Workforce Action Plan 

These documents set the context and the underpinning principles behind our actions. 

2. Actions  

• Delivery plan 2023-2025 
• Later delivery plans 

The actions contained within the Delivery Plan set out aim to achieve the following outputs. 

3. High level outputs 

• Improved mental health and wellbeing service waiting times 
• Standardisation of mental health and wellbeing care pathways 
• Improved training and resourcing of mental health and wellbeing workforce 
• Improved data & information practices and strategic planning 
• Improved understandings of Mental Health and Wellbeing needs for vulnerable  
• Improved legislative environment  
• Improved mental health and wellbeing services & availability of services 
• Improved understanding of mental health stigma & discrimination  
• Improved mental health and wellbeing resource & availability of resources 
• Increased focus on prevention & early intervention 

Improving these outputs should encourage positive changes across the system as a whole. 

4. Thematic Changes 

• The number of people receiving the services and supports the need; public understanding of mental health and wellbeing issues; and the ways that these issues are discussed and perceived, improves. Increasingly this leads to improve community mental health and wellbeing support, enhanced resilience to daily adversity across Scotland, and more equitable access to care that accounts for the wider determinants of mental health and wellbeing.

• Planning and availability of mental health and wellbeing supports, services, and resources, and work and training within these, improves across Scotland. Increasingly these, alongside public policy, account for the ways that social, economic, and environmental conditions, impact upon people’s mental health and wellbeing and incorporate these wider determinants into planning, policy, and delivery at all times.  

These changes will help us evaluate whether or not we have made positive impact towards the 9 outcomes set out in the Strategy 

5. Outcomes 

• Overall mental health and wellbeing of the population is increased and mental health inequalities are reduced (outcome 1)  
  • Population Mental Health and Wellbeing and community summary outcomes (outcomes 2, 3, 4) 
  • Mental Health and Wellbeing services supports, workforce, and public policy summary outcomes (outcomes 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).