FOI 26-226 Mental Health Calls under 18yrs old
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 26-226 Mental Health Calls under 18yrs old
- Request Date
- 13 May 2026
- Response Date
- 11 Jun 2026
- Information Requested
The number of 999 calls received by SAS for patients aged under 18 relating to psychiatric/mental health conditions, suicide attempts and abnormal behaviour, including overdose, cuts/lacerations (with intent to cause self harm), overdose, suicide attempts by strangulation, hanging and jumping. Please also include the number of deaths in under 18's by inhalation, overdose, jumping, and non-accidental strangulation and hanging. Please provide this data for each of the following years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.”
- Response
Please note caution when interpreting this data
The mental Health calls have been identified using any one of the following methods:
- Chief Complaint = Mental Health
- Final Crew Code = Mental Health
- Any TRUE/YES recordings in the mental health screen of the EPRF.
These methods explicitly remove dementia, Aspergers, learning disabilities or autism responses.
Overdoses have been defined as incidents that met the metal health flag and had a final crew code of ‘Overdose’
We have provided figures for incidents that had the mental health flag and the ‘self Harm Injury’ section selected on the EPRF and figures that had the mental health flag and the ‘Suicide Attempt’ item has been selected on the EPRF. These figures would be inclusive of any self-harm or suicide attempt method.
We are unable to identify incidents that specify, cut/lacerations with the intent to cause harm or suicide
attempts by strangulation, hanging or jumping. We have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002 to this component of your request as complex skill and judgment would be required to interrogate each individual and we consider this as information not held.
The Scottish Ambulance Service does not have the dataset to report on the number of suicides attended, if the patient is deceased then a cardiac arrest code would be entered. The cause of death would be determined at a later time without involvement from the Scottish Ambulance Service. The National Records of Scotland report on suicide figures (Probable Suicides, 2024 - National Records of Scotland (NRS))
This report has been produced in two parts, this is due to the ongoing integration of a new system. This data cannot be merged into one table due to an overlap in a phased introduction of each system and the methodology for the data time frames is different.
The first tab of the sheet takes data collected from our legacy system (T2) and the second tab of the sheet details data collected from (T3)
For the given data, you will see that some of the figures are shown as, five or less than five and greater than zero. please note that this figure has been suppressed because the statistical value is less than five. The Scottish Ambulance service has a duty, under the Data Protection Act to avoid directly or indirectly revealing any personal details. It is therefore widely understood that provision of statistics on small numbers, five or less are statistically suppressed upon disclosure.
- Response Documents
