News Item:
HBSC data used in Scottish Government report on young people's mental health

A new report from ScotPHO - a collaboration by ISD Scotland, NHS Health Scotland, the Glasgow Centre for Population Health, National Records of Scotland, and Health Protection Scotland - uses data from HBSC Scotland to understand mental health and its contextual factors for Scottish children and young people. It will enable evidence-informed decision making for mental health improvement policy and planning by providing the focus for ongoing and future actions.

The report, entitled “Scotland's mental health: Children and young people 2013”, analyses a broad range of indicators covering mental health (mental wellbeing and mental health problems) and its context (including individual, family, learning environment, community and structural factors). Analyses of equalities, by age, gender, area-based deprivation and urban-rural classification were undertaken for mental health outcomes and a description of contextual factors by age and gender is also reported.

Key findings

• Overall, the mental health of children and young people has improved or remained stable over the past decade or so in Scotland. However, there remain, considerable opportunities to improve mental health and the conditions in which it can flourish to enable Scotland’s young people to reach their full potential.
• The extensive inequalities across a wide range of mental health outcome indicators demonstrates the need for both targeted and population-wide strategies, to ensure more equal opportunities and outcomes between genders, ages, and socio-economic groups.
• The wide-spread variation in the contextual factors associated with mental health by gender and age highlights this need to ensure more equal opportunities and outcomes between genders and across different age groups. Particular attention should be paid to the regularly occurring pattern of deterioration in many contextual measures as children age, and in the strong patterning of mental health outcomes by gender and socio-economic deprivation in particular.

see here for further details
contact: Mr John Hancock

item 2072
[09-01-2014 to 01-06-2014]

 

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