Chamber and committees

Other than time spent on the initial scoping work, there has been no spend on the development of a National Pharmaceutical Agency.

Since its introduction in July 2020, over 3 million NHS Pharmacy First Scotland consultations have taken in place across Scotland.

In the annual Dispenser Payments and Prescription Cost Analysis publication, Public Health Scotland reported that in financial year 2021-22 alone, a total of 2,954,181 Pharmacy First consultations were undertaken with 95% providing advice on self-care or treatment at the point of contact, therefore removing the need for unnecessary visits to GP practices, Out of Hour services or Emergency Department for everyday self-limiting conditions.

Consultations using PGDs in 2021/22 accounted for 4% (119,728) with 84% (100,182) being treated by the community pharmacy instead of requiring a GP/Out of Hours appointment.

Public Health Scotland has also reported that in 2021/22, 23% of the Scottish population (1,242,801 people) accessed Pharmacy First services at least once.

Current funding of £30.8 million is allocated for NHS Pharmacy First Scotland. This includes £10 million of new funding which was invested between 2020-21 and 2022-23.

This funding provides a monthly base payment to every pharmacy for provision of the service as well as activity payments for specific interventions. These pharmaceutical care interventions are Advice, Referral or Treatment.

Civil servants operate flexibly across a range of pharmacy policies and programmes according to the specific requirements of the work at any time. They do not, as a matter of course, record the proportion of their time that they spend working on particular matters. It is therefore not possible to say specifically how many hours were spent by civil servants involved in this work.

This question relates to operational matters that are the responsibility of the Scottish Court and Tribunals Service (SCTS) corporate body. The question has been passed to the Chief Executive of the SCTS who reply in writing within 20 days.

The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) has confirmed that they are not aware of any reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete within the SPS estate.

Following a recent review of its estate, Police Scotland identified reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) in three of its buildings.

Police Scotland took immediate action to ensure that there was no risk to officers, staff or the public, and continues to work with structural engineers to identify longer term solutions for these buildings.

We are investing £1.45bn in policing in 2023-24. No additional funding has specifically been provided to Police Scotland for this issue.

The action was carried out and completed as part of the first 100 Days of the AI Strategy.

As reported in the 2021-22 State of AI Report we shared the following –

Capability Directory

The Scottish AI Alliance connected with ScotlandIS regarding their existing Data Capabilities Directory back during the First 100 Days. The Directory was recently refreshed. Another update took place in Autumn and the Support Circle team worked with the ScotlandIS team to ensure that AI capabilities are incorporated sufficiently into the directory. The Directory was also actively promoted by the Scottish AI Alliance to the AI community across Scotland and has been added to the Scotland’s AI Strategy website as a resource. Investigations of future format of the directory have started and there is potential for it to be incorporated in a larger piece of work in collaboration with the Scottish Tech Ecosystem Review (STER) and Digital Strategy teams at Scottish Government.

We will continue to monitor and contribute to this work as required.

Scottish Enterprise are in the process of commissioning a landscape review of AI businesses in Scotland. The database gathered by the review will be incorporated into the Scottish AI Playbook in due course. The review is currently being finalised and will be released in the coming weeks.

The cost for the Scottish AI Playbook build to date has been £17,820 including VAT.

The Scottish AI Alliance is a partnership between The Data Lab and the Scottish Government and is led by a Minister-appointed Chair and overseen by Senior Responsible Officers from The Data Lab (CEO) and the Scottish Government (CDO).

The team consists of 4 Scottish Government Civil Servants and five individuals who are based at the Data Lab, Scotland’s innovation centre for data and AI, which is administratively hosted by the University of Edinburgh.

An annual grant is paid to the University to cover the cost of staffing and activities carried out by the Data Lab team, including the delivery of the annual Scottish AI Summit, – the cost of this is as follows –

2021-22 - £265,000.00 – Grant awarded via Scottish Funding Council

2022-23 - £505,593.15 – Grant awarded directly by Scottish Government Digital Directorate

This is therefore all public funding and there is no private funding of the Alliance.