Chamber and committees

63% of respondents for whom health was a relevant concern told us that their ability to access health services was much better or a little better after receiving support from Connecting Scotland. 36% of respondents told us that their ability to access health services hadn’t changed and 1.4% said that access was worse or much worse.

If this result was reflected across the entire Connecting Scotland cohort of over 60000 people receiving devices, we could estimate that around 38,000 of those would have experienced some improvement in accessing healthcare services.

Overall this result indicates a positive impact of Connecting Scotland support on people’s ability to access the health services they need. It may be that respondents who felt there had been ‘no change’ in this respect already had a routine means of accessing the healthcare services non-digital channels (e.g. ordering repeat prescriptions over the phone). With more and more digitisation of healthcare service touchpoints being implemented in order to create efficiencies and save money it is likely that the numbers of people using their Connecting Scotland device and internet connection for this purpose will show an increase with time.

Here are some of the things that Connecting Scotland users have told us about how it has benefited them to use their device and internet connection to access health services:

“Allowing very important near me medical calls”

“Being able to access health services much easier, including managing appointments and medicines.”

“It has allowed us to do more things and stayed connected to appointments within the NHS, so I've been able to attend my hospital appointments via the tablet and it allows me to see things on a bigger screen than a small mobile phone (I have bad vision).”

(Aggregated survey data for phases 1 and 2 of Connecting Scotland. There were 1174 responses overall for whom access to health services was relevant.)

The Scottish Government continues to work with the Veterans in Custody Support Officer network to encourage breakfast clubs for veterans in Prison.

In 2020-21, the Scottish Veterans Fund provided funding to the Lothian Veterans Centre to run a weekly lunch-time club for older veterans providing a welcoming environment for companionship and peer support. More generally, the Scottish Veterans Fund has provided funding to several projects which provide support to veterans to integrate into the local community, such as an activity co-ordinator for veterans in FirstLight Café in Falkirk, or away days for veterans in the Huntly region through Networks of Wellbeing.

We continue to support Housing Options Scotland to provide its Military Matters project. This service focuses on housing issues affecting people serving in the Armed Forces in Scotland; all UK Service personnel transitioning into civilian life in Scotland, and veterans – helping them to find the right home in the right place.

We have also published a housing guide which provides information about housing in Scotland and contacts of organisations who may be able to help Armed Forces and ex-service personnel obtain housing suitable for their needs. The guide also directs veterans to the Veterans Gateway which provides information and support to veterans and their families.

The Scottish Government provided £3,000 in 2020-21 to Legion Scotland to deliver Befriending and Mental Health First Aid training to individuals from the veterans community, including breakfast club volunteers. These sessions were initially delayed due to the pandemic. However, Legion Scotland successfully delivered the Mental Health First Aid training in March 2022. The planned Befriending courses were cancelled due to lockdown and the funding initially allocated was refunded to Legion Scotland and re-purposed to support the delivery of the MHFA training. In total, 28 people attended the courses including several admin staff from multiple breakfast clubs.

We use a range of measures to monitor the wellbeing of the workforce taking into account the diverse nature of the workforce operating in a range of roles and geographies, the broad spectrum of wellbeing needs at both a professional and personal level and different reporting arrangements across sectors. Our approach reflects a combination of the following measures; the annual iMatter survey, feedback from local and national staffside and other stakeholder channels, academic research, data collected by regulators and partners and evaluation of nationally-led initiatives. In addition, the Wellbeing Champions Network is now well-established to provide feedback on areas of priority need, and to share best practice across health, social care and social work organisations.

We are continuing to work with leaders across health, social care and social work, as well as hearing directly from staff, to understand where the current pressures are, and what further actions can be taken to mitigate their impact on staff. We are working on a range of local initiatives designed to meet the basic and practical needs of staff, and their teams. This includes access to quiet spaces to support health and wellbeing, and the installation of lockers.

The Scottish Government has established a Workforce Data Information and Intelligence Improvement Programme to support the ambition of the National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care in Scotland in achieving its vision of a ‘sustainable skilled workforce with attractive career choices and fair work where all are respected and valued for the work they do’.

This ring-fenced Programme of work focuses specifically on delivering actions which improve Health and Social Care workforce data, information and / or intelligence at national level which will contribute to better decision making, planning and strategy for the Health and Social Care Workforce in Scotland.

This work will be integrated, where appropriate with service delivery plans across the system, working towards a consistent approach to analysing the workforce and workforce data for future planning.

To ensure collaboration with stakeholders the programme is governed by the National Workforce Forum which has cross-sector representation from primary, secondary and social care. Two projects within the Programme are currently live, both governed and actioned by a cross-sector team of key stakeholders, including Project Teams and User Needs groups.

The first project is developing a process for annual workforce projections modelling. High level conclusions from initial projections modelling will be published in early 2023 and include details of assumptions and methodology used in development of the projections model.

This work will be further developed iteratively in response to emerging evidence and data and to capture the complexity of the health and social care workforce and its inter-dependency with financial and service planning.

The second project involves identifying key data links and gaps to address which will improve parity of data collection, design and data quality across the Health and Social Care workforce. User needs assessments of the current workforce data are currently underway across the Health and Care landscape.

The Programme’s medium and longer term plans will involve collaborating with service and financial planners to scope work to better integrate workforce data with service and financial delivery plans for health and social care.

An update on the National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care will be published later this year.

I refer the member to the Scottish Government’s publications webpage. You can find the framework here: Acute Oncology Service (AOS) in NHS Scotland: principles - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

We support veterans across our housing legislation. We published Social Housing Allocations in Scotland – A Practice Guide in 2019, to ensure that social landlords have an allocation policy that complies with all relevant legislation and statutory guidance. The guide provides clarity for social landlords about giving priority to Service leavers. The guidance also reinforces the need for social landlords to have clear information and housing options in place for all applicants, including veterans.

We amended legislation so that, from 1 July 2019, where the landlord is a charity providing accommodation to veterans, a private residential tenancy agreement will not apply. This will ensure that veterans specific accommodation in the private rented sector can continue to be used, ensuring that a veteran may be offered temporary accommodation for a period of rehabilitation and training, or permanent accommodation in line with the organisation’s charitable purpose and the needs of the veterans.

There is a statutory requirement on local authorities to produce a Local Housing Strategy that sets out its strategy, priorities and plans for the delivery of housing and related service. In September 2019 we published refreshed Local Housing Strategy guidance which encourages Local Authorities to fully consider the housing requirements of the Armed Forces community. The guidance has also been strengthened to encourage appropriate engagement with relevant organisations, such as Veterans Scotland, to better understand the needs of the Armed Forces community when developing Local Housing Strategies.

Scotland has some of the strongest homelessness legislation in the world and all local authorities have a legal duty to provide support to anyone at risk of homelessness, including veterans. We are also proposing new homelessness prevention duties, to be included in a forthcoming Housing Bill. These will include new duties on public bodies to ‘ask and act’ about housing situations and a change to existing legislation to allow local authorities to act at an earlier stage to prevent homelessness. Our approach is based around the principles of shared public responsibility, earlier intervention across systems and more choice and control for people over their housing options, which will include the veterans population

We are also taking action to make improvements across the rented sector that will progress the right to an adequate home and deliver our vision for Housing to 2040.

Veterans’ specific welfare support is supported by UK Government policy and delivered by Veterans UK and the Veterans Welfare Service (VWS) , part of Ministry of Defence (MOD). The UK-wide service works with local authorities, voluntary organisations, service charities and the Veterans Advisory and Pensions Committees .

Within devolved areas of responsibility including provision of welfare advice and delivery of the Scottish Government benefits, the Scottish Government is committed to ensuring access to benefits and advice to support veterans and other seldom heard groups. The Scottish Government’s Benefit Take-up Stakeholder Reference Group works with a range of specific seldom-heard groups, including veterans’ groups, to better understand and address non-take-up among particular populations and to maximise incomes. Our Benefit Take-up Strategy outlines our approach to inclusive communications and marketing campaigns. Our Strategy prioritises a person-centred approach and we are committed to inclusive communication standards and supporting seldom-heard groups, whose needs are often complex and require bespoke forms of engagement. Our communications and marketing campaigns are developed in a mindful way which aims to reach as many people as possible and considers those who may not access the most common channels of communication or those who have particular communication requirements.

The Scottish Government has designed the application guidance for Scottish Government benefits to provide comprehensive information on entitlement. Similarly, signposting is included to refer clients to the relevant agencies for reserved benefits where appropriate. Clients may be directed to Veterans UK for further advice. We have also worked with Veterans UK to develop an information sharing process between the organisation and Social Security Scotland. This is intended to ensure that veterans can efficiently access the support to which they are entitled.

The funding awarded through the Scottish Veterans Fund in each year since it was established in 2008 are shown in the following table.