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I am very confident that it will be fully and appropriately staffed. As I said, the service has been many years in development and we recognise that particular care needs to be taken of children and young people who find themselves in that situation.

It is a specialist in-patient service that we have not had previously, but we have expertise in forensic CAMHS in Scotland—for example, we have Dr Blower. We can look to examples from the secure care estate and at how the estate operates in England to learn what might be required in terms of training and operational procedures for the unit to work well.

We operate CAMHS in a way that has the child or young person at the centre of their care. The care plan is developed in line with GIRFEC, and trauma-informed practice is an important part of that jigsaw. Our aim is that our entire public services workforce will be trauma informed. For CAMHS, it is absolutely crucial that staff are trauma informed and that that training is available to them. Most of them will already be trauma-informed practitioners.

I do not know whether Dr Blower wants to say more about the workforce.

Yes, we do think that it was sufficient. Although there were only nine responses received, they were from key bodies that were charged with upholding the human rights of children in Scotland.

Subsequent to receiving the responses to the consultation, my officials met each of the respondents to ensure that we captured any concerns that they had about the legislation. Therefore, I think that, in addition to the formal consultation, there has been a good level of engagement with people who are charged with scrutinising the process in this situation.

They have been built in as safety and security measures that seek to protect rights while also protecting safety. There are conditions for how measures can be used. There are record-keeping requirements and, importantly, there is oversight and scrutiny by the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland. All of those provisions act as safeguards for the rights of children and young people who might be detained in Foxgrove, while enabling the necessary measures to be taken to ensure that they are safe.

Foxgrove will be working to the secure care standards, so in its consideration of how it will operate once the regulations are in place, it is looking carefully at the secure care standards. It is a slightly different environment, but there is a lot of learning to be had from looking at how the secure care environment operates. It also looked at national standards that apply in England to pick up on good practice points. Therefore, to reassure you, Foxgrove will operate to the secure care standards.

The opening is now scheduled to be in mid-March 2024. There have been some building challenges, as is often the case, in the completion of the construction projects, which have meant that there is a slight delay. The building is now expected to be completed and operational in mid-March next year.

The committee can have confidence that the health board—as in all the sites that it operates—is capable of identifying the staffing requirements for, and the training needs of, the people who are going to work in the unit.

As we have said, the recruitment process has already begun. As the service is completely new, we would expect that that process would need to begin early to enable the opportunity for any shadowing or networking that might be required on other sites. We do not have anything like that in Scotland yet, so we would expect that the process would begin early and that there would be a slightly longer lead-in time than there would be if we were just building a hospital like what we already have in Scotland.

Yes, there were. There is a children’s panel, which helped us with the development of Foxgrove and has been part of the process of designing the building to ensure that it meets children’s needs. It also engaged in some consultation with children and young people who had been detained in medium-secure settings. Ruth Christie can say a bit more about that process.

To be clear, all of those operational details are the responsibility of NHS Ayrshire and Arran. A question with that level of detail should probably be put to NHS Ayrshire and Arran, which will be charged with that. It is easy for us to say what we expect to happen, but if you need reassurance on whether a risk assessment has happened and whether training needs were identified during that risk assessment, it is probably best to put that question to NHS Ayrshire and Arran.

Thank you, convener. I thank the committee for asking me to attend today to give evidence on the draft Mental Health (National Secure Adolescent Inpatient Service: Miscellaneous Amendments) (Scotland) Regulations 2023.

Before we begin the questions, I thought that it would be helpful for me to provide some short opening comments. I am pleased that, after many years of planning and development, the national secure adolescent in-patient service—known as Foxgrove—is almost ready to admit patients. Foxgrove will be a vital and important addition to children and young people’s mental health services in Scotland.

Foxgrove will provide services for children and young people aged between 12 and 18 who are subject to measures for compulsory care and treatment, have a mental disorder, present a significant risk to themselves or other people and require a medium-secure level of security in order to meet their needs. Having the facility in Scotland will mean that young people with extremely complex needs can have their needs met in a purpose-built and designed facility, with expert care delivering high-quality mental health care and treatment.

Members will hear me speak more about the mental health strategy in the chamber this afternoon, but the opening of the facility supports the vision that is set out in Scotland’s “Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy” for a Scotland that is

“free from stigma and inequality, where everyone fulfils their right to achieve the best mental health and wellbeing possible.”

One of the outcomes within the strategy is:

“increased availability of timely, effective support, care and treatment that promote and support people’s mental health and wellbeing, meeting individual needs.”

Foxgrove will play a key part in that by providing a dedicated and appropriately skilled multidisciplinary healthcare team to deliver the level of care that young people deserve, closer to home.

Adding Foxgrove to the regulations will ensure that the service can implement a range of safety and security measures to support the therapeutic environment and ensure the safety and security of children and young people as well as staff and visitors. The measures will be applied only when necessary, and they will be applied in a proportional way that is sensitive to the developmental stage of the child or young person.

Of course, it goes without saying that, when the measures are applied, they will also uphold and protect the human rights of children and young people.

Moving on to the specific the statutory instrument that is before the committee today, the regulations make amendments to the Mental Health (Safety and Security) (Scotland) Regulations 2005 and the Mental Health (Detention in Conditions of Excessive Security) (Scotland) Regulations 2015, so that the same safety and security measures that are available in other medium-secure in-patient settings can be applied, where necessary, in Foxgrove.

Children and young people who are detained in Foxgrove will also have the same right of appeal against detention in conditions of excessive security as those detained in other medium-secure in-patient settings. I consider that a right of appeal is an essential safeguard in the process, and that children and young people should have that right when they are detained in Foxgrove.

The regulations do not create any new enforcement or monitoring mechanisms; they simply apply the existing mechanisms to Foxgrove.

Laying the regulations is an important step in preparing Foxgrove to admit patients, which it hopes to do early in 2024. They lay the framework for a safe, secure and—importantly—therapeutic environment, where children and young people’s human rights are upheld and protected, and they allow them to appeal the level of security at which they are detained.

I am happy to answer any questions that the committee has.

I will ask Dr Blower to tell you a little bit more about how CAMHS operates.

In general, and as you would expect, medical services that are available to children operate with UNCRC at their heart. In Scotland, we use getting it right for every child—GIRFEC—as a framework for all public service interaction with children and young people, so you would expect that to be human rights compliant and age appropriate.

With regard to the consultation, we have not done a formal children’s rights and wellbeing screening sheet and impact assessment to assess how compliant these regulations are, but we have asked a lot of the questions relating to the CRWIA as we have gone along. The reason for not doing a formal CRWIA is that these regulations are an amendment to existing regulations and they do not contain any new protective measures; they are about applying measures that are already available to a new site. We would certainly consider doing a full and formal CRWIA if that was what Parliament wanted.

We think that the timescales are right, because the patients are not likely to be short-stay patients; they are likely to be longer-term patients. We think that the appeal processes are appropriate.

I do not know whether it would be reasonable to ask Dr Blower about that. Would you like to give a little bit more information about that, Aileen? Ruth Christie could perhaps then pick up on the question about consultation on the timescales.