Scottish ECT Audit Network (SEAN)
Reporting on data from January 2025 to December 2025

About this release

The Scottish Electroconvulsive Therapy Audit Network (SEAN) aims to improve the quality of care for patients who undergo electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). ECT can be used to treat conditions such as mood and psychotic disorders. This annual release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) presents a summary of the SEAN data for January to December 2025.

Main points

• 263 patients received electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) over the reporting period, resulting in 278 episodes (or courses) of treatment (a patient can receive more than one course of treatment).

Graph displaying percentage of female and male patients who received ECT treatment, broken into 10-year age groupings. A higher percentage of patients are female and both sexes were most represented by 60-69 year olds.

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Percentage of patients receiving ECT, by age group and sex from January to December 2025

• 4,189 individual ECT treatments were delivered in Scotland over the reporting period.
• The majority (82.4%) of ECT episodes were classified as severe illness based on diagnosis (e.g., severe depression or schizophrenia), and/or baseline CGI-S or MADRS score.
• Documented adverse events arose in less than 1% of individual treatments delivered during this period.
• Most patients reported no side effects during treatment. Among those who did, headache was the most frequent in the 24 hours after an individual treatment session. Headache was also the most common side effect reported over the course of treatment.
• Using Clinical Global Impression-Improvement Score (CGI-I), 88.9% of episodes showed improvement in score after receiving treatment, while 4.2% were associated with a worsening score.

Background

SEAN began in 1996 as a national audit project examining the clinical practice of ECT in Scotland. The audit is supported by a range of clinical professionals, including consultant psychiatrists, consultant anaesthetists, clinical psychologists, ECT nurses, operating department practitioners and recovery nurses.

In June 2023, the new Scottish Standards for ECT were published. This marked a shift in the audit's focus, prioritising the collection of pragmatic and clinically meaningful data on ECT, with particular emphasis on treatment efficacy, side effects and safety. As a result of this change, the audit will be able to provide high-quality, validated information that can be used to drive improvement in ECT at a local and national level.

Further information

The next release of this publication will be September 2027.