Mental health and wellbeing strategy - delivery plan and workforce action plan: progress update and next steps

Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy - Workforce Action Plan

• To support delivery of the Plan, Scottish Government have provided NHS Education Scotland (NES) with around £30 million in 2024/25 to continue multidisciplinary education, training and workforce expansion for staff. This includes, but not limited to:
• 84 places in the Masters’s programmes in Applied Psychology in Primary Care and Applied Psychology for Children and Young People and 84 Doctorate in Clinical Psychology places available in training programmes in Psychology services. Trainees are jointly matriculated with education partners whilst employed by NHS Scotland Health Boards – postholders deliver clinical services during training, therefore supporting delivery of the CAMHS and PT waiting times and improving outcomes for people accessing services. (Action 34.1, Train)
• Up to 50 places on the Enhanced Psychological Practice (EPP) programme are available on the post-graduate certificate level education programme which enables staff to deliver high-quality, evidence-based psychological interventions for mild to moderate mental health difficulties. Within the EPP Programme, there are two courses; one which focuses on learners working with Adults (EPP-A), and a course targeted at learners working with Children, Young People and their Families (EPP-CYP). (Action 35.1, Train)
• Increasing routes into the workforce through four new and distinct job roles for Psychological Interventions Assistant (PIA) jobs were approved in October 2024. These PIA roles will work within a range of service settings to deliver high quality, brief, outcome focused, evidence based psychological interventions for people with mild to moderate mental health problems, using a variety of delivery methods, such as face-to-face in person, using video technology or over the telephone. (Action 35.1, Train)
• Over 4,000 multidisciplinary education and training places were delivered directly (face to face or screen to screen) to the workforce across a broad range of workstreams, with over 100,000 in person or online engagements with education and training offers accessed by a wide multi-sector, multiprofessional workforce. (Action 26.2, Train)
• Increased capacity and delivery for service posts to help meet the access standards for psychological therapies across Scotland. Funding has enabled expansion of the workforce in key pressure areas, increasing supervision and training capacity in applied psychology and psychological therapy. The main impact is increased clinical service delivery, supporting 18.4WTE working with older adults; 25.4WTE Clinical Associates in Applied Psychology; and 65.3WTE additional CAMHS service posts. (Action 26.9, Train)
• Additional educational infrastructure has been made available to local boards across the following areas: Local Area Tutors; Trauma Coordinators; Learning Disabilities; Early Interventions for Children; and the EPP Programme. Boards utilise this resource to ensure safe and effective learning and education opportunities for the trainees, deliver training and supervision, conduct learning/training needs analysis of Psychology and multidisciplinary staff, and liaise with NES around outcomes and local requirements. Boards deliver and implement a programme of training in evidence based psychological approaches locally or nationally, in partnership with NES, and monitor and report on local delivery (including post training evaluation). (Action 26, Train)
• To support the implementation of the Plan, in partnership with NES the mental health and wellbeing workforce education and training advisory group has continued to explore opportunities to increase awareness, uptake and accessibility of existing, reliable mental health training resources and what further resources might be needed to support the training needs of the wider workforce. (Action 20, Train) This resulted in:
  • The development of the Mental Health and Wellbeing - Learning Starters resource (referred to in the Plan as Mental Health induction framework) which will be accessible across all sectors, including volunteers and carers. The first iteration went live on 9 May 2025. (Action 20.1, Train)
• Continued to fund the creation additional posts for resident doctors to undertake psychiatry specialty training with uplifts made to Core Psychiatry, Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, General Adult Psychiatry and Old Age Psychiatry as well as the introduction of run-through training programmes for Child & Adolescent Psychiatry and Intellectual Disability Psychiatry. (Action 34.2, Train)
• Recruitment into Core Psychiatry has improved drastically in recent years with 100% of entry-level posts being filled for a fourth consecutive year. (Action 16, Attract)
• The Scottish Government has actively shared and promoted the most up to date equalities messaging, resources and training available. These have been designed to meet the essential learning needs of the health and social care workforce. Linking these resources into the workplan of the education and training advisory group (Action 23, Train). This has included:
  • Equality Diversity and Human Rights digital resource (Action 23.1)
  • Cultural Humility online resource (Action 23.2)
  • Transgender Care and Knowledge Skills Framework (Action 24)
  • Carer awareness and Triangle of Care (Action 48.8)
  • As well as ensuing that updated resources are included in the resources for Primary Care (Action 49) and Unscheduled Care (Action 22) in Mental Health.
• The MSc Leading Digital Transformation in Health and Care for Scotland is a flagship programme, designed to develop a new generation of leaders who can drive, deliver, and embed digital transformation across Scotland’s health, social care, social work and housing services. Funded by the Scottish Government and led by NHS Education for Scotland, the programme is delivered by the University of Edinburgh’s Health and Social Care Data Driven Innovation Talent Programme, based at the Usher Institute. (Action 31, Train) The programme has so far seen:
  • Cohort 1 - PG Certification - 48 participants, all passed the certificate year
  • Cohort 1 - 40 out of 48 continued into the diploma year
  • Cohort 2 - PG Certification - 24 participants in this year
• Council Leaders agreed a new doctorate model for Trainee Educational Psychologists (EP) in November 2024, to better meet the needs of councils, wider stakeholders and provide a more sustainable model for the EP profession. Recruitment has commenced for trainees to begin the new doctorate course from September 2025. (Action 34.4, Train)
• Scottish Government has exceeded our commitment to provide funding for 320 additional staff in CAMHS by 2026, increasing capacity for cases by over 10,000 - supporting those who require mental health treatment and care and providing additional capacity to support more children and young people in the community and at home, supporting our progress to meet the 18-weeks CAMHS standard. (Action 35, Employ)
• Funding has continued for additional mental health workers providing local provision and support in key settings, including A&Es and GP practices via the Enhanced Mental Health Outcomes Framework, exceeding the original commitment of 800 mental health workers. This funding will be included in overall board allocations from 2026-2027 onwards. (Action 35.7, Employ)
• The psychiatry recruitment and retention working group was established to consider the challenges facing the profession where key stakeholders and experts have come together to produce a series of recommendations aimed to support the psychiatry workforce in NHS Scotland. The working group are due to report to Ministers in Spring 2025. Whilst the report work has been underway we have worked with key stakeholders to make improvements such as the development of resources by Centre for Workforce Supply to support recruitment in psychiatry and updates to the psychiatry webpages which promote careers in Scotland. (Action 16, Attract)
• The mental health nursing review will be published shortly. It considered key themes such as strengthening the contribution and impact of the profession, voice, leadership, education and development, nurturing the workforce and remote and rural consideration. Human centred design principles informed the Review process. Three advisory groups set the direction and contents of the Review report. Alongside a literature review, our National Mental Health Nursing Conversations, which included engagement with over 1,000 mental health nurses and students and views from those with lived and living experience and carers. This resulted in the report’s five overarching themes and it’s 25 recommendations. A new implementation group will be established to ensure effective collaboration, delivery, monitoring and evaluation of review actions, reporting to both the Nursing and Midwifery Taskforce Implementation Group and the Mental Health and Wellbeing Leadership Board. (Action 15, Attract)
• Since 2022, the Scottish Ambulance Service mental health and dementia care team have delivered education, training and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) to a total of 3,703 people. They continue to explore innovative ways to deliver mental health education. For example, the recently published podcast which allows staff to listen from mobile devices whilst on frontline duties as well as a number of bite sized CPD videos that sit alongside links to online training resources. (Action 31, Train)
• Work is ongoing with our stakeholders to develop a parenting resource to support kinship, foster, supported lodging carers and adoptive parents to provide trauma-informed care for their children and young people to help them to thrive now and in the future. Working with NES, initial learning materials and resources have been developed into a course that will be delivered in person over several sessions, with follow up reflective coaching. Initial small-scale testing took place in conjunction with the Trauma Responsive Social Work Services team in March 2025 in West Lothian with a group of foster carers. Work will continue with stakeholders and carers to consider next steps and to further test and develop this resource in 2025-2026. (Action 21, Train)
• Aligned to the delivery plan, a rebranded National Trauma Transformation Programme (NTTP) website was launched in November 2023 to help raise awareness and increase the accessibility of the freely available trauma-training resources and supporting guidance for implementation. The Roadmap was published in November 2023. An online webinar (with over 560 attendees) took place in January 2025 focused on the resource, sharing practical learning from the Scottish context around how a range of services and organisations are using the Roadmap to support them in their work. (Action 26.1, Train)
• The Trauma Responsive Social Work Services workplan (Action 28, Train) has:
  • Developed and delivering a comprehensive programme of implementation and learning support, initially to four pilot sites (social work services and multidisciplinary teams), which included the development of new training products on worker wellbeing, power sharing with lived experience, professional supervision, and safety and stabilisation (trauma enhanced).
  • Revised Codes of Practice for social services workers and their employers to include a new code on working in a way that is informed by an understanding of the impact of trauma.
  • Updated Continuous professional learning for registered social services workers updated to mandate learning on psychological trauma, with specific learning for newly qualified social workers (NQSWs).
  • Piloted ‘Transforming Connections’ Trauma Skilled Training with follow up coaching support with over 200 NQSWs in 2023 to consider suitability of the training for NQSWs. Learning from this was shared with key stakeholders. ‘Transforming Connections’ is now being delivered to NQSWs while work is underway with local NQSW leads to consider how best to embed this learning into their mandatory supported year programmes. There is also a pilot with social work students in three universities to assess suitability for students.