Chamber and committees

The 7 March 2024 publication by Nature Scientific Reports concerning mass mortality events in salmon aquaculture focused on the community impacts in relation to specific catastrophic events in Chile. Similar impacts on communities have not been experienced in Scotland and the Scottish Government does not consider that speculative extrapolation between Chile and Scotland on community impacts or worker safety is appropriate given differences in circumstances and approaches including health and safety regimes.

Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited (CMAL), as procuring authority for new vessels for the Scottish Government, operate under the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015 and also comply with the statutory and legislative requirements derived from The Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014.

Contracts for Operators of Ferry Services are also subject to the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015 and also comply with the statutory and legislative requirements derived from The Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014.

The Scottish Government does not hold central information on NHS boards’ provision of 24/7 end of life care at home for children.

The Integrated Clinical Hub is made up of a variety of clinical staff, which can flex as demand dictates across a 24/7 model but the core roles are:

• 41 clinical advisors (Nurse and Paramedic level).
• 39 GP’s work a range of clinical sessional work every week.
• 146 Advanced Practitioners spend a third of their time within the Integrated Clinical Hub (ICH).
• 9 Senior clinical support managers who support the clinicians and oversee clinical activity and quality.
• 11 staff make up the leadership team who support all aspects of the ICH.

All staff across all roles work nationally to support patients throughout Scotland, whilst they may work in specific locations reflecting their employment base the technology allows them to work seamlessly across Scotland.

The Scottish Ambulance Service is currently in the final stages of evaluating the work of the Integrated Clinical Hub (ICH) across 2023 and this evaluation will be shared with Scottish Government.

Scottish Government (SG) officials have met with Professor Sir Michael Marmot on various occasions during the period April 2021 - April 2024. Professor Marmot’s evidence-based approach to tackle health inequalities underpins the work of our Care and Wellbeing Portfolio and so each engagement has offered important insights into Professor Marmot’s work, helping to inform future policy development.

On 28 June 2022 Government officials met with Professor Marmot to discuss Scottish Government’s Place and Wellbeing Programme and the Care and Wellbeing Portfolio, more broadly, as well as to garner insights into the Marmot cities approach. Since then, officials have engaged with Professor Marmot as part of last year’s Public Health Scotland (PHS) Conference held on 28 November 2023. This included both a short meeting between Professor Marmot and the Permanent Secretary during the conference, plus an evening event in which senior SG officials alongside PHS, Local Government and NHS colleagues discussed priorities to improve Scotland’s health and tackle health inequalities.

In June 2023, SG and PHS soft launched the Care and Wellbeing dashboard as a source of data and intelligence to support the ambitions of the Care & Wellbeing Portfolio. This is structured around the evidence-based Marmot framework Fair Society Healthy Lives (The Marmot Review) - IHE (instituteofhealthequity.org) which looks at the wider social determinants of health, the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age which can lead to health inequalities. Work is underway to integrate this into the Scottish Public Health Observatory ScotPHO profiles (shinyapps.io) (ScotPHO) Online Profiles tool, as a distinct Care and Wellbeing profile, to provide a single repository of public health intelligence to support local action to tackle health inequalities.

The Scottish Government remains eager to learn more from Professor Marmot’s work in our wider ambition to improve health and wellbeing and reduce health inequalities.

It is for each individual NHS Board to determine how they plan to meet the needs and priorities of their local populations. The Scottish Government is committed to increasing access to diabetes technologies. We are continuing to work with key stakeholders to determine the best way to do this and how to fund it.

As this is an operational matter for Scottish Water I have asked them to respond. Their reply is as follows:

I refer the member to the answers to S6W-15158 on 3 March 2023 and S6F-02135 on 19 May 2023 for information on Scottish Water’s approach to installing CSO monitors at priority locations. As confirmed in these answers, no new event duration monitors (EDMs) were installed in 2021 or 2022.

Scottish Water’s annual update to the improving urban waters routemap, published on its website at Scottish Water (readymag.website) , confirms that 230 new EDMs were installed in 2023. In addition, Scottish Water installed a further 229 sensors as part of its wastewater intelligent network (WWIN) transformation programme, of which 53 are EDMs.

In 2024 to date, Scottish Water has installed a further 633 new EDMs. Plans have also been approved for 450 new EDMs in 12 further WWIN catchments.

All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers , and https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/official-report/search-what-was-said-in-parliament .

The Scottish Government does not hold this information. The Digitisation of records is an operational responsibility of individual Health Boards and GP practices, therefore, it may be available from local Health Boards.

The Scottish Government increased student funded places for pre-registration nursing, including children's nursing, for ten successive years and we now have a record intake target of 4,536 to support workforce sustainability.

Whilst the Scottish Government sets strategic policy direction for the NHS in Scotland, operational matters including staffing are in the first instance the responsibility of the relevant NHS board. This will depend on the service needs of each board taking account of national, regional and local priorities, and we expect NHS boards to plan and provide safe, effective and high-quality care, in line with their statutory service provision and workforce planning responsibilities.

The Scottish Government actively supports health boards across Scotland to plan locally for service need and for service delivery.