Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government does not hold this information.

a) A national headache pathway was launched in October 2023 by the Centre for Sustainable Delivery at NHS Golden Jubilee. This pathway aids clinicians, including GPs, in the diagnosis and management of headache disorders, including migraine. The pathway specifically includes guidance for the treatment of migraine in primary care.

b) Through the Neurological Care & Support Framework, the Scottish Government provided £221,176 in total to the Migraine Trust across 2022-24, to work with community, primary and secondary care pharmacists to help people with migraine manage their symptoms and treatments more effectively. The work has been undertaken in NHS Grampian, and is being expanded into further NHS Boards who are working towards adopting this model of care.

Through this work an eLearning programme and resource page has been developed on NHS Education for Scotland’s platform TURAS. This comprises a suite of training materials available for all pharmacists and pharmacy teams to access.

The Scottish Government is committed to increasing the availability of medicines that patients in Scotland need.

A national headache pathway was launched in October 2023 by the Centre for Sustainable Delivery at NHS Golden Jubilee. This is to aid clinicians in the diagnosis and management of headache disorders, including migraine, and offers guidance on management of conditions.

Through the Neurological Care & Support Framework, the Scottish Government awarded £221,176 in total to the Migraine Trust across 2022-24, to work with community, primary and secondary care pharmacists In NHS Grampian to help people with migraine manage their symptoms and treatments more effectively.

Through the success of this project, a further seven NHS Boards are working towards adopting this model of care in future.

In Scotland, the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) appraises the clinical and cost-effectiveness of newly licensed medicines, following receipt of a submission from the manufacturer. Where the SMC accepts a medicine, or accepts it with restrictions or on an interim basis, there is an expectation that NHS Boards will consider the medicine and make it (or its equivalent) available. This is considered by each NHS Boards’ Area Drug and Therapeutics Committee.

NHS Boards are expected to reach a decision within 90 days of being informed of the SMC advice, which provides time to consider any issues associated with the implementation of the medicine, such as changes to the care pathway and staff training. Boards should publish their decision on their website within 14 days of the decision.

The SMC appraisal is undertaken independently of Scottish Ministers and is based on the clinical and cost-effectiveness of the medicine at a population level.

The Pain Management Task Force oversees the implementation of the Framework for Pain Management Service Delivery in Scotland. Discussions at the Task Force are centred around delivery of the actions in the Implementation Plan rather than condition specific issues. While there have been no specific discussions on migraine-related issues at the Task Force, many of the actions in the Plan discussed at each Task Force meeting will benefit people with migraine, such as updated quality prescribing guidelines and the creation of a chronic pain Knowledge Hub, a resource available to all NHS Scotland staff and third sector organisations to deepen their understanding of chronic pain.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on numbers of patients travelling and the means of travel. However we are aware of an increase in travel on the sound of Harris Ferry following changes to the Benbecula Stornoway air service in April 2024.

As you may be aware, at the meeting to consider Access to Health Services in the Western Isles on 21 August, it was agreed to establish a working group, led by HITRANS, to consider ways to improve the patient experience.

At the first meeting of this group, NHS Western Isles and CalMac confirmed that they are working together to minimise issues for patients using ferry travel through a block booking of 2 cars per day for NHS Wester Isles patients. It was noted that monitoring of capacity and demand is ongoing by NHS Western Isles and CalMac will consider an increase in pre booked spaces if required.

The Scottish Government has no plans to recommission the Scottish Schools Adolescent Lifestyle and Substance Use Survey (SALSUS), as it was integrated into the Health and Wellbeing Census in 2021-22.

The Scottish Sea Fisheries Statistics 2023 was originally scheduled for publication in September 2024. This publication was delayed until November 2024 as a result of an unscheduled revision of previous years data for the United Kingdom by the Marine Management Organisation. Our publication includes fishing data from the Marine Management Organisation for the rest of the UK. We therefore needed to delay our publication. We are hoping to publish the Scottish Sea Fisheries Statistics 2023 in late November or early December 2024. The exact date will be confirmed by the end of October 2024.

More detail on the data revision by the Marine Management Organisation, which was published on 8 October 2024, is available at: UK Sea Fisheries Statistics: Unscheduled Corrections - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

The Scottish Schools Adolescent Lifestyle and Substance Use Survey (SALSUS) was integrated into the Health and Wellbeing Census in 2021-22. A link to the Health and Wellbeing Census is provided here:

Health and Wellbeing Census Scotland 2021- 2022 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

Planet Youth is a long term, upstream preventative approach and as such we would not yet expect to see a reduction in the substance use. The purpose of the pilot, which only started last year, is to build capacity in local communities to allow them to better use and understand data directly from their young people. There is significant evidence from Iceland that the approach works to reduce the number of young people engaging in health harming behaviours, and in increasing the age of first use. The pilot should allow us to ascertain the challenges and opportunities in transferring this model to Scotland, thanks to the 6 local areas who are pioneering the approach. There is an ongoing learning evaluation which will be published after the pilot ends in March 2025. Preliminary findings indicate there has been progress so far both in terms of taking a whole systems approach and at a community level. We are also seeing increasing interest in investing in prevention at a national and local level. It is clear from the numbers that pre-existing campaigns on substance use among teenagers are not as effective as we would like, hence the investment in a longer term, more systemic approach. There may be a misunderstanding about what Planet Youth is and colleagues from national charity Winning Scotland, who are facilitating Planet Youth in Scotland, would be happy to provide more information to interested members.

The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation rural deprivation evidence summary included sections describing the main issues associated with using SIMD in rural areas, as well as ways of overcoming these through using the wide range of available data sources alongside SIMD for exploring particular topics or communities of interest. The evidence summary was published alongside two case studies Fuel poverty in Dumfries and Galloway and Child poverty in the Orkney Islands which illustrated how this could be done. The SIMD 2020 introductory booklet included a case study on using SIMD in a rural area.

Scottish Government has also published (or funded) a number of reports and resources on poverty and deprivation in rural areas, including Poverty in rural Scotland: evidence review, The cost of remoteness - reflecting higher living costs in remote rural Scotland when measuring fuel poverty: research report, National Islands Plan Survey: final report, Improving our understanding of child poverty in rural and island Scotland, A design based approach to understanding and tackling rural child poverty,Scottish Islands Survey 2023: main findings,Rural Scotland data dashboard: overview and Review of evidence on rural community interventions.

The Scottish Government Office of the Chief Social Policy Adviser has recently funded a UKRI/ESRC Policy Fellow to carry out research on trends in rural and island poverty.

National Records of Scotland are in the process of developing the 2022 Census-based household level deprivation indicator which will allow analysis of key household variables by deprivation for very small geographies.

There are numerous other reports and resources produced by a range of external stakeholder organisations.