The Scottish government has revealed figures for the number of hospital admissions for children who self-harm.

In the past decade, children have been admitted more than 7,000 times for self-harming and for over 16s the figure has topped 160,000.

Liberal Democrat spokesperson Ross Finnie branded the statistics “astonishing” after obtaining them through a parliamentary question.

According to Public Health Minister Shona Robison, an extra £5.5million for mental health services will be available by 2011-12 which will lead to an estimated increase of 15-20 per cent in specialist staff.

Mr Finnie said that while community mental health support had been increased over the last 10 years, the funding had not always moved from hospitals to community care.

“An Audit Scotland report published last year warned that there are long waits to access certain services, particularly services for younger and older people, and there is a lack of out-of-hours and crisis services in some areas.,” said Mr Finnie.

“This was backed up by a more recent report into child and adolescent mental health which warned about the prevalence of self-harm and the lack of systematic support.

“The health secretary needs to act on these figures and address the concerns about mental health services outlined by Audit Scotland.”

Ms Robison responded with: “We are aware of the extent of the issue of self-harming and are committed to tackling this.

“We are committed to improving access to both community and in-patient mental health services and we see increasing the specialist Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) workforce as key to this.

“This increased workforce will help NHS boards deliver our new waiting time target for access to specialist CAMHS, meaning no-one will wait longer than 26 weeks by March 2013 at the latest.”

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