Chamber and committees

NHS expenditure per person by the Fife Health Board in 2010-11 was £1,635. The average spend by territorial health boards across Scotland was £1,759 per person.

The Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency (AHVLA) is responsible for veterinary surveillance in England and Wales only. In Scotland, veterinary surveillance services are mostly provided by Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC), with some services supplied by the Moredun Research Institute.

AHVLA must be informed where there is suspicion of a notifiable disease (such as foot and mouth or avian influenza) in Scotland. The Surveillance 2014 project will not impact on this work as it is focussed solely on the provision of surveillance services in England and Wales.

The Common Agricultural Policy classifies all types of business as “holdings”. Consequently, the following table shows the information available for the 10 largest amounts paid in respect of the Single Farm Payment Scheme, the largest single support measure, to agricultural holdings. The amounts are for the 2011 period, the most recent period for which information is available.

The Financial Memorandum accompanying the Aquaculture and Fisheries (Scotland) Bill sets out the anticipated costs associated with the measures in the Bill, including any anticipated costs to the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_Bills/Aquaculture%20and%20Fisheries/b17s4-introd-en.pdf

In certain circumstances, it is possible that SEPA’s costs might increase by a de minimis amount.

The Scottish Government funds medical research through the Chief Scientist Office (CSO) which has responsibility for encouraging and supporting research into health and healthcare needs in Scotland. CSO has not directly funded any research into myasthenia gravis, but would welcome research project proposals which seek to investigate the condition. These would be subject to CSO’s standard peer and committee review processes. The Scottish Government does not hold information relating to funding provided by the UK Government for medical research. This information is readily available to view on the National Research Register Archive website, which can be found at:

http://www.nihr.ac.uk/Pages/NRRArchiveSearch.aspx

Since 2007, there have been three changes in designation which have been part of service modernisation and improvement initiatives to improve services for patients. Each change has been part of wider strategies which have involved extensive public consultation and detailed assessment.

Scottish Canals categorises the condition of its principal and most significant non-principal assets using a five-point condition grading system of A (very good) through to E (bad) in order to establish priorities for maintenance work. The latest information available as at 1 November 2012 is as follows:

Scottish Canals take a risk-based approach in using the funding available to maintain the network. They concentrate on those assets in the poorest condition and that have the highest consequence of failure e.g. in terms of safety or the impact on the wider network.

This information is not collected by the Scottish Government at this time, however the community nursing workload measurement tool will be able to supply indicative information by spring 2013.

The Scottish Government’s national drugs strategy The Road to Recovery is clear that methadone is only one component in a package of care, treatment and recovery that can be offered to individuals to help them recover from problem drug use.

To prevent abuses when methadone is prescribed, it is essential that it is carefully dispensed and appropriately supervised to ensure patient safety and also to reduce the risk as far as practically possible of it being used illicitly. The level of supervision required for each person is determined by the prescriber following clinical and risk assessment of an individual’s drug use. This is in line with the UK clinical guidelines Drug Misuse and Dependence, UK Guidelines on Clinical Management. Chapter 5 of these guidelines covers in detail best practice on pharmacological interventions such as opioid maintenance prescribing, individual patient risk assessment, supervision and opioid detoxification. To gather more information on opiate replacement therapies such as methadone, the Scottish Government has commissioned an independent expert group, to objectively consider the evidence supporting the role of opiate replacement therapy in the treatment of substance misuse. Following this process of evidence gathering, the group will make recommendations to the Scottish Government, for consideration in Parliament, to ensure that such medical interventions are being used appropriately and in line with the international evidence base. This group will report in the spring of 2013.

Information on the numbers of drug related deaths in Scotland is published annually by the National Records of Scotland and is available via:

http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/statistics/theme/vital-events/deaths/drug-related/index.html

Information about the numbers of deaths that have been attributed to methadone is complex because many deaths are of people who used methadone and also other substances, some of which were believed to be implicated in, or to have potentially contributed to, the cause of death. Therefore information on how many deaths have been attributed to methadone in (a) Edinburgh and (b) Scotland in each year since 2000 is presented in three sets of figures in the following table.

Note: Up to 2007, some pathologists reported only those drugs which they thought caused, or contributed to the drug-related death. From 2008, they reported separately: (a) drugs which were implicated in, or which potentially contributed to the cause of death; and (b) other drugs which were present but which were not considered to have had any direct contribution to the death. The figures for 2008 onwards are on the first basis - i.e. basis (a) - which is now the standard basis for figures for individual drugs.

Reference: National Records of Scotland Drug-Related Deaths in Scotland in 2011 Report, Footnote, page 34.

The following table shows the number of cochlear implant procedures that have been carried out for (a) adults and (b) children in each financial year since 2000-01.

Number of cochlear implant procedures performed in Scottish hospitals. Adults and Children - Years ending 31 March 2001 to 2012.

Source: Cochlear Implant Service Annual Reports 2000-01 to 2011-12.