Activities of the National Forensic Psychiatry Service

• A more flexible system for the allocation of forensic psychiatric and psychological examinations would speed up their execution.
• There is a wide disparity in the workload of forensic experts and workload standards have not been reviewed for almost 10 years.
• The performance indicators of the National Forensic Psychiatry Service do not reflect the waiting time in the queue for forensic examinations.

The activities of the National Forensic Psychiatry Service are not sufficiently efficient and effective to ensure shorter timeframes for examinations, which have an impact on the length of civil and criminal proceedings. This is shown by the audit of the National Audit Office "Activities of the National Forensic Psychiatry Service".

„"The aim is to have all examinations completed within 30 days. We have found that forensic psychiatric and psychological examinations have had to wait more than 400 days. Long waits to assess, for example, whether a person suspected of committing a crime is criminally liable have a negative impact on the work of pre-trial investigation bodies and courts. If they were not obliged to choose a specific territorial unit, expert examinations in civil and criminal cases could be carried out more quickly. This would also help to unify the workload of court experts", says Mindaugas Macijauskas, Auditor General.

According to the auditors' calculations, if any territorial unit could have been chosen, examinations could have been completed 6 months faster in civil cases and 3 months faster in criminal cases in 2023. The specific territorial unit is listed in the court order in accordance with the Service's Rules of Procedure, which does not allow the Service itself the flexibility to use all the resources available and to assign the examination to another unit with a shorter waiting queue. In 2023, the waiting queues for examinations varied by up to 6.5 times between the territorial units of the Service in civil cases and by up to 4.5 times in criminal cases.

According to the audit, the actual workload varies by up to 3.5 times between forensic experts working at the same level, the average workload of forensic experts varied by up to 1.5 times between the territorial units in 2023, and 23% of forensic experts' positions were vacant as of 31 December 2023.

The Service's performance indicators do not show the length of the queue for an examination, but only the time it takes to prepare an examination report. According to the auditors' calculations, 27% of examinations in criminal cases and 19% of examinations in civil cases are conducted within 30 days from the date of receipt of the court's order at the Service. Without measuring the actual duration of the examination - including the time spent waiting in queues - it is not possible to get a true picture of the extent of the problem of long examination deadlines.

Following the implementation of the recommendations of the National Audit Office, the number of expert investigations conducted within 30 days of the receipt of the court order and the material at the Service will increase to 75% by 2028 (currently 67%).