Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government continues to invest in the registered nurse role across community, social care and primary care settings. We have introduced in partnership with NHS Education for Scotland a funded scheme to enable former nurses and midwives to complete a Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) approved Return to Practice (RtP) programme and to re-enter the professional register across all fields of practice.

We have also invested over £45m since 2021 to train and introduce into the workforce an additional 375 nurses within the district nursing service. This investment supports the shift in balance of care into community settings by delivering more care in homes and reducing rates of admission to the acute hospital service.

The Scottish Government launched a national marketing campaign in November 2021 to attract more people with the right skills and values to the social care sector including nurses for social care settings. This campaign concluded in February 2022. In addition, the Scottish Government is working with the Department for Work and Pensions to host a series of sector-specific job fairs across Scotland during April and May to support recruitment efforts to all role types, including nurses, within the sector.

We have been working with NHS Boards to increase the use of international recruitment to alleviate pressures and fill key roles by supporting a number of measures. We have already provided £1m across NHS Scotland to build capacity within recruitment teams and a further £1m to fund International Recruitment Lead Posts. We are also recruiting at least 200 registered nurses from overseas with funding of £4.5m available to Health Boards to take forward this recruitment.

On 11 March 2022, we published the National Health and Social Care Workforce Strategy.

As part of the Strategy, we have committed to taking forward specific actions to improve how we gather, use and assess NHS Workforce data. This includes taking steps to improve the demographic data we collect and the analysis we undertake of data obtained at different geographic levels within our health and social care system.

The Strategy further commits us to taking forward complementary actions to improve workforce planning capacity and capability within our health boards and health and social care partnerships (HSCPs).

New guidance has already been communicated to health boards and HSCPs to support the production of demand-led 3-year workforce plans, supported by local systems’ workforce data. Later this year we will also publish new staffing projections for health and social care.

Complementary data systems and data improvement work is taking place, as part of the Implementation Programme being established to support delivery of the Workforce Strategy. We have undertaken to publish annual updates outlining progress with the Strategy’s implementation, in support of our tri-partite ambition to achieve long-term workforce sustainability through recovery, growth and service transformation.

The SIGN guidelines recommend all diagnoses should ideally be made through a multi-disciplinary process and not done by a single clinician.

There is no requirement for the diagnosis to be made by any particular profession. This should be dependent on who has the skills and experience and may include Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Paediatricians and Speech and Language Therapists.

Not all health professionals will be trained to diagnose as this is a specialist skill, but it is the expectation of the Scottish Government that they should be aware of and have access to referral pathways.

By the end of Core Psychiatry training, trainees must be able to:

• receive a full psychiatric history from and perform a Mental State Examination (MSE) on patients within a range of mental and neurodevelopmental disorders across the lifespan in routine, urgent and emergency situations, incorporating appropriate terminology.
• assess patients from a range of different cultural, spiritual, and religious backgrounds, including asylum seekers and refugees, and demonstrate an understanding of how protected characteristics may impact on clinical presentation.

In order to successfully complete Core Psychiatry training, all trainees must undertake a neurodevelopmental sub-specialty placement, either Intellectual Disability (ID) or Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), so they are aware of and will be familiar with the process of diagnostic assessment.

General practitioners are essential to recognition and assessment. Autism is covered in the GP Curriculum alongside a range of other neurodevelopmental differences. Clinical psychology doctoral trainees receive training in relation to assessment and intervention for people with neurodevelopmental disorders, including Autism. Undergraduate training ensures that any Speech and Language Therapist at any level can provide or contribute assessment information that could assist an assessment team in making a diagnostic decision.

The Scottish Government commissioned NHS Education for Scotland (NES) to produce the NES Autism training plan, to ensure that staff involved in diagnostic assessments across the lifespan have the right skills and knowledge, prioritising staff from across Scotland who are involved in diagnostic assessment.

The Scottish Government does not currently have plans to conduct an under 16 cancer patient survey. The Managed Service Network for Children and Young People with Cancer published a strategy in September 2021, ‘ Collaborative and Compassionate Cancer Care ’, which commits to improving services nationally and supporting a consistent approach to care and treatment across the country for children and young people up to the age of 25. This strategy was developed through consultation with service users, parents and carers, partner organisations and NHS Scotland staff.

NHS Boards are responsible for managing their resources to meet the needs of their population’s workforce and in line with local and national priorities.

The information requested is not collected or held centrally by the Scottish Government and would require to be obtained from Health Boards.

There are currently 837 Community First Responders. The Scottish Ambulance Service maintain a rolling database of CFRs so do not hold historic figures.

Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) Guideline 122 on the prevention and management of venous thromboembolism (VTE) was first published in December 2010. Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS), of which SIGN is a part, carried out awareness raising activity following publication which included the following:

• As an aid to standardising the information provided to patients on VTE across Scotland, the text of the model patient advice leaflets on DVT, which the Chief Medical Officer sent to all NHS Boards in January 2008, was included in appendices to the guideline.
• In April 2011 an information leaflet on deep vein thrombosis (DVT) for the general public was made available for download from the SIGN website. Distribution of paper copies was led by the SIGN Patient Involvement Officer.
• Work with its partners to embed the Guideline’s recommendations into general practice decision-making software.

Subsequently, Healthcare Improvement Scotland took forward work on VTE as part of the Scottish Patient Safety Programme.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on spend relating to the above work.

The Minister for Equalities and Older People has invited Hourglass to meet with her to discuss funding for its elder abuse helpline. Hourglass have yet to suggest a date to meet.

The numbers of Community First Responders (CFRs) that were allocated to and attended incidents in the last financial year are presented in the table below. For safety reasons as a result of Covid, Community First Responders were stood down for a six month period in 2020. The required training for remobilisation of all volunteers and CFR schemes extended into 2021.

Please note that if two Community First Responders were allocated to the same incident, then they will both be counted.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-08411 on 17 May 2022. 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 .