FOI 26-456 Menatl Health Cars
Freedom of Information Request
- Reference
- FOI 26-456 Menatl Health Cars
- Request Date
- 30 Sep 2026
- Response Date
- 16 Oct 2026
- Information Requested
(1) Since the date of introduction, post trial period, how many times have mental health triage cars been deployed to physical locations from their bases. Please break this down by area i.e. Glasgow base, Inverness base, Dundee base.
(2) Please provide details of the coverage times by location i.e. does the Glasgow car have 24/7 7 days a week coverage, please provide this for each base location.
(3) Please provide total incident or call numbers for incidents that have been brought to the attention of the staff in these units but this has been dealt with remotely. I.e. how many times (total count by area) has an incident been sent to the mental health triage team/cars but they did not attend in person and it was dealt with by remote telephone contact.
- Response
Q1 - The data has been provided from 01/01/2023 - 30/09/2026; this is the timeframe for when we have reliable reporting data from.
Please note caution when interpreting this data
There may have been times during the early stages of this period when MHPRU were recording data on paper so incident counts may be underreported.
Note that the crews also support with non-mental-health incidents such as Immediate Life-Threatening Incidents, the information provided is only incidents attended by the MHPRU where Mental Health has been noted as a factor.
Where no Health Board name is provided this is in an incident where a health board could not be identified.
This report has been produced in two parts due to the phased introduction and ongoing integration of a new clinical recording system. The T2 and T3 datasets use different recording structures and extraction criteria, with an overlap between the systems during the transition period. The figures are therefore presented separately and should not be added together to produce a combined total, as this would not provide a reliable measure of activity. The figures reflect procedures as recorded within each system and are dependent on the accuracy and completeness of clinical data entry.
Please see the attached sheet detailing the total count of unique incidents where the MHPRU was in attendance, the total count of conveyances and the total count of referrals where the patient was not conveyed.
The second sheet details the same information but broken down by health board area.
For the given data, you will see that some of the figures are shown as, five or less than five, please note that this figure has been suppressed because the statistical value is less than five but greater that zero. 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.
Q2 – The operating time of each base is:
MHPRU Base
Operating Hours
Glasgow
24 hours per day, 7 days per week (07:30-19:30 and 19:30-07:30)
Inverness
24 hours per day, 7 days per week (07:30-19:30 and 19:30-07:30)
Dundee
Monday-Sunday 18:00-06:00 and Friday-Sunday 08:00-18:00
Q3 - The Scottish Ambulance Service does not hold a recorded total of incidents referred to the Mental Health Paramedic Response Units that were managed remotely by telephone without an in-person attendance.
Although information is held about individual incidents and MHPRU attendances, our operational systems do not contain a specific, consistently completed and reportable field that identifies whether an incident was managed remotely by the MHPRU. Consequently, the requested totals cannot be obtained through a straightforward extraction or compilation of existing recorded information.
This would require the application of specialist knowledge, interpretation and complex judgement to derive a new categorisation that is not currently recorded within our systems. It would therefore amount to creating new information rather than compiling information that is already held.
The Scottish Information Commissioner’s guidance distinguishes between compiling information from readily available records and creating new information. Where producing an answer would require skill and complex judgement, the resulting information is not considered to be held for the purposes of FOISA.
It is for this reason we have applied section 17 of the Freedom of Information Scotland Act 2002, as information not held.
- Response Documents
