Mental Health and Wellbeing Leadership Board: monitoring and evaluation update paper

1. Monitoring

Developing a Monitoring Framework for the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy – by Scottish Government Analytical Services Division

1.1 Purpose

The aim of this work is to create a Monitoring Framework that will help track progress on the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy’s outcomes using reliable data. This will be done by identifying key metrics and additional data points for each outcome, where available.

Unlike evaluation, these metrics won’t measure how much progress is directly caused by the Strategy’s actions. Instead, they will show overall changes in important areas.

1.2 Activities since December 2024

• Key data sources have been identified and reviewed to assess their suitability as metrics for monitoring the Strategy’s outcomes. This work informs the development of the draft Monitoring Framework.
• Where the data is available, metrics have been identified for most of the Strategy’s short-, medium-, and long-term outcomes, as well as its summary outcomes.

For each metric, where data is available, the Monitoring Framework outlines:

• Why the data source was chosen.
• Any limitations of the data.
• Where data is missing for monitoring, these gaps have been gathered to highlight areas where data needs improvement across the Strategy. These gaps will help guide plans for better data collection.

1.3 Next Steps

The development of the Monitoring Framework will contribute to work led by Public Health Scotland (PHS) to determine priority areas for evaluation. For example, this could mean matching the data gaps with the evaluation tasks outlined in the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework for the Strategy.

1.4 Expected Outputs

This year, the work will produce:

• A Monitoring Framework, setting out all Strategy outcomes alongside their aligned metrics.
• An update report, providing insights on short-term and summary outcomes.

These outputs will be published alongside the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework for the strategy, which is being developed by colleagues at Public Health Scotland.

Future reports will focus on monitoring the Strategy’s medium- and long-term outcomes and will be published in subsequent years.