Chamber and committees

From the £12 million earmarked to expand Hospital at Home and provide additional capacity over winter, we have confirmed funding of more than £3.5 million, of which the majority of health Boards will get a share, for delivery of additional capacity in 2023-24.

Work is ongoing with Boards to finalise the conclusions around impact of the enhanced services over winter but NHS Boards have reported patient feedback has been extremely positive for the new services.

The safety and security of people’s data, and the running of NHS services is of the upmost importance. The NHS in Scotland and across the UK successfully defends itself against attacks on its IT infrastructure on a daily basis, demonstrating resilience to the threats faced.

An Implementation Delivery Group has been set up which has held two meetings on 21 February and 20 March 2024, with a third meeting scheduled for the end of April.

Membership of the Implementation Delivery Group consists of representatives from clinical services, third sector and lived experience, under the chairmanship of Jim Miller, the Chief Executive of NHS 24.

Excessively long waits are, of course, unacceptable. We are working hard to drive down the longest waits, which have been exacerbated by the impacts of the global pandemic, to ensure all people receive the treatment they need as soon as possible.

The commitments set out in our £1bn NHS Recovery Plan support an increase in inpatient, day-case, and outpatient activity through the implementation of sustainable improvements and new models of care, and NHS Scotland’s Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD) is working with Health Boards to ensure that they are able to continually identify new ways to increase capacity, and to respond to demand through service innovation and redesign.

CfSD programmes have developed strong clinically-led Specialty Delivery Groups (SDG), including one for General Surgery which is currently focused on Inguinal Hernia, Biliary Disease, and Emergency Laparoscopic and Laparotomy Scottish Audit (ELLSA) pathways.

SDGs promote multidisciplinary team working, and support local adoption of service improvement programmes and have supported several new and innovative pathway developments, many of which are now being successfully scaled up across Scotland, including Active Clinical Referral Triage (ACRT).

The NHS Golden Jubilee also continues to provide Health Boards, including NHS Lanarkshire, with capacity for key elective services, such as General Surgery, with patients treated on the basis of their clinical priority and length of wait.

We will publish minutes of meetings to date of the SBA Task and Finish Group by the end of July 2024. For any future meetings of the group minutes will be published within 12 weeks after the meeting has concluded.

Updated guidance on the use of mobile phone technologies in schools will be published in the coming weeks. The current guidance to education authorities and schools on this issue remains available from Guidance on Developing Policies to Promote the Safe and Responsible Use of Mobile Technology in Schools (www.gov.scot).

The regulation for the pricing and supply of medicines is reserved to the UK Government. Scottish Government officials worked closely with their counterparts in the UK Government during the 2024 Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing, Access and Growth (VPAG) negotiations with the pharmaceutical industry, however, the devolved administrations were not included in the formal negotiations.

Commitments made on medicines and pharmaceutical manufacturing sustainability in the 2024 VPAG can be found in section 7.11 to 7.14 here: 2024 Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing, Access and Growth (publishing.service.gov.uk) .

If an application for a building warrant is made which proposes the use of an external wall cladding system assessed in accordance with BR 135 when tested to BS 8414 as a means of compliance, then this information would be stated within the application. Local authority verifiers would consider the application on that basis.

In accordance with the Section 34 letter (Building standards - notification of application for building warrant: section 2.0 fire: letter to local authority verifiers - 31 October 2023) , local authority verifiers have to notify the Scottish Government’s Building Standards Division if any application is made that is supported by a BS 8414 test and BR 135 assessment report. To date, we have received no such notifications for any school building.

We will publish recommendations of the SBA Task and Finish Group to date by the end of July 2024.

Cancer remains a national priority, within the Scottish Government and across NHS Scotland, with urgent suspicion of cancer referrals continuing to be prioritised. NHS Grampian provided a 62 day performance improvement plan with an associated £973,764 funding from Scottish Government in 2023-24. Officials continue to work with NHS Grampian to ensure there is sustained focus locally to deliver these plans.

We are committed to reducing inpatient and day-case waiting lists by an estimated 100,000 patients over the next three years, backed by planned investment of an extra £100 million annually, subject to the annual Scottish Budget process, we will work closely with NHS boards and stakeholders on a number of key actions which will see patients treated as quickly as possible.

An initial investment of £30 million will now be funded as part of our on-going management of this and will target reductions to the national backlogs that built up throughout the pandemic, including orthopaedics treatments, diagnostics for cancer referrals and patients with the longest waits. This will enable NHS Scotland to maximise capacity, including theatre capacity, build greater resilience and deliver year-on-year reductions in the number of patients who have waited too long for treatment.