How international benchmarking is shaping mental health policy in Scotland and New Zealand

NHS Benchmarking Network's International Mental Health Benchmarking programme is directly shaping national policy. Across two days, the Scottish Government and New Zealand's Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission, Te Hiringa Mahara, shared case studies showing exactly how.

Now in its fourth cycle since 2018, and run in partnership with the Global Leadership Exchange, this year's programme brought together eight countries: Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, Sweden and Wales, representing a combined population of 156 million people, 316,000 inpatient admissions and 38.3 million clinical contacts. The webinar's findings session covered how the eight compare across four themes: spending and investment, access and service models, workforce, and quality and outcomes.

The findings highlighted the variance in expenditure on Mental Health Services across the participating nations. Community access rates also varied widely, with the highest performing countries seeing more than three times as many patients per head of population as those with the lowest, reflecting genuinely different ways of organising and delivering care rather than a single right model.

In Scotland, benchmarking data gathered through the network revealed unwarranted variation the Scottish Government had long suspected but could not previously evidence, from admissions to bed use across the country's health boards. That evidence directly informed Scotland's Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy and a £120 million investment in recovery and renewal, and is now underpinning a new Blueprint for Mental Health Services built around more integrated, community-based care. Read the case study.

In New Zealand, the same international lens added valuable context to a positive domestic trend. Seclusion incidents have fallen substantially since a national reduction policy was introduced in 2009, the international programme of work enabled comparison with other systems to truly understand how their system stacked up. That evidence strengthened the Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission's case for a formal recommendation to government to work towards eliminating seclusion, since adopted into the implementation plan for New Zealand's new mental health and wellbeing strategy. Read the case study.

Benchmarking only matters if it changes what happens next.

Scotland and New Zealand show what that looks like in practice, reaching very different, equally significant outcomes from the same international evidence: one reshaping a national strategy, the other strengthening a case to end seclusion. It is exactly the kind of real world impact the programme exists to support.

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