Chamber and committees

A range of digital mental health therapies are available to support people to self-refer. These include treatments for: Insomnia, Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Stress, Resilience, Space from COVID, Supporting An Anxious Child, Supporting An Anxious Teen.

These treatments are open to anyone through self-referral across all areas of Scotland. In addition to this we have about 12 treatments open to self-referral for Health and Care staff, this including depression, a range of anxiety disorders. Table 1 provides more detail on what is currently available.

Table 1: Digital Therapies - Available treatments

There are a range of different digital tools that already support, or have the potential to support, safer staffing and more flexible working arrangements – by its very nature the use of digital enables new ways of working. This includes, for example, the provision by Health Boards of laptops and remote login access to a number of staff, the roll-out across NHS Scotland of Microsoft Teams and the wider M365 platform that supports flexible communication and collaboration across organisational boundaries, development of decision support tools to support clinical decision making and use of patient-facing tools such as Near Me that do not require staff to remain in a fixed location. Working with the likes of NHS National Services Scotland, we continue to support the development and implementation of further tools in support of the health and social care workforce. This includes the roll out of new GP IT systems, which will better support multi-disciplinary team working in community settings, tools to support better scheduling of appointments and utilisation of theatre and workforce capacity, and rostering tools to better support strategic workforce planning.

Phase 1 of Mind to Mind is complete and offers people short videos on how people living with mental health conditions manage them and signposts to support services. We are currently scoping a second phase which is anticipated to include more diversity of lived experiences and a focus on self-help and self-care.

The recently released Data Strategy for Health and Social Care sets out our intent to improve the capture, storage and use of protected characteristics data. The Scottish Government is currently exploring the range of methods to achieve the commitment made in both the Delivery Plan and Data Strategy, including the significant opportunities presented by the new CHI system that is due to be operational in autumn of this year.

The KIND learning network channel continues to grow and currently has 830 members. Weekly community meetup sessions are provided. Learning priorities are guided from learner requirement insights and the focus has been building advanced analytic capacity across the sector providing learning resources for a range of analytic platforms.

Yes. Our National Information Governance Plan has been established in support of the Data Strategy for Health and Social Care, based on the recommendations of the Information Governance Review. The overall work includes a refresh of the Information Governance Framework.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-18810 on 20 June 2023. 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

Official launch of the Cyber Centre of Excellence (CCoE) physical location was on 15th December 2022. The CCoE is based in Abertay University cyberQuarter.

The Scottish Government, NHS Scotland and our partners have an ongoing commitment to developing UK and international collaborations. This includes active participation in European and International networks as well as hosting of inward study visits to Scotland and outward visits to international partners. Inward visits include from the Netherlands, Denmark, Andalucia, Wales, World Health Organisation (Georgia and Macedonia) and Spain.

The Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre (DHI) play a key role in supporting inward investment opportunities. This has included:

We are following the Scottish Approach to Service Design. All our work will be person-centred and we will be working closely with those who will use the record – including those in receipt of care and frontline staff – to understand what is important for the integrated social care and health record.

We have also largely concluded technical research to understand what digital approaches, services and products have enabled similar services outside of Scotland and what lessons can be learned from both successful and unsuccessful digital projects and programmes We have also reviewed the technology, service and digital architectural landscape across the public, private and third sector organisations who are involved in the delivery of social care services in Scotland to understand how best to implement an integrated record.