Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government welcomes the report Understanding the value of lung cancer nurse specialists.

It is NHSScotland boards’ responsibility to plan and deliver services, including specialist nursing services, taking account of national priorities and local needs.

Scotland’s Chief Nursing Officer has asked nurse directors to consider the implications of recent reports on specialist nursing provision in order to share practice across boards and to help to identify areas where additional guidance or support from the Scottish Government may be useful.

The Scottish Government works closely with regional cancer networks and NHS boards to ensure there is the required workforce to meet current and anticipated increases in demand for oncology services.

However, it is for each NHS board to plan and deliver high quality, safe and sustainable services taking account of national and local priorities. This includes how best to utilise funding and deploy staff.

The Scottish Government has supported the development of nursing workload and workforce planning tools to inform decisions about nursing and midwifery establishments. Application of these evidence based tools, takes into account professional judgement and local context, and includes assumptions in relation to absence levels. The suite of available tools includes clinical nurse specialists. Application of the tools has been mandatory since April 2013, and all NHS boards are expected to use the tools to inform local nursing and workforce planning.

The Detect Lung Cancer Early campaign fronted by Sir Alex Fergusson was launched on 6 November 2013, with a repeat phase of media marketing running from 13 January 2014.

It is too early to measure the impact of the programme on five-year survival rates for lung cancer. Capital and revenue has been made available to NHS boards to support an increase in diagnostic and treatment capacity. In addition Health Improvement Scotland are undertaking a review of the Scottish Referral Guidelines for Suspected Cancer which includes lung cancer. A series of primary care education sessions focussing on lung and colorectal cancers have also taken place.

Information on how many NHS lung cancer nurse specialists there have been in each NHS board area in each year since 2010-11 is shown in the following table.

It should be noted that a change in the definition of a clinical nurse specialist in 2011 means that the numbers are not strictly comparable across the years. Also, due to the multidisciplinary nature of the role, a nurse may work in more than one specific specialty although only one specialist area is recorded for each nurse. The figures shown may not include those nurses recorded against another specialty, but who also spend part of their time working in the lung cancer area.

The number of lung cancer clinical nurse specialists staff in post in NHS Scotland from Sep 2010 to Sep 2013 (Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) and headcount) by NHS board.

Source: Scottish Workforce Information Standard System (SWISS), ISD Scotland

The Scottish Government is fully committed to providing the people of Scotland with the NHS services which meet their needs and maintain high standards of care.

The Scottish Government works closely with regional cancer networks and NHS boards to ensure there is the required workforce to meet current and anticipated increases in demand for oncology services.

However, it is for each NHS board to plan and deliver high quality, safe and sustainable services, taking account of national and local priorities. This includes how best to utilise funding and deploy staff.

The national Detect Lung Cancer Early campaign fronted by Sir Alex Fergusson was launched on 6 November 2013 and activity is still underway with a repeat phase of national social marketing running from 13 January 2014.

NHS boards have developed local detect cancer early implementation plans to tackle earlier diagnosis of all three tumour types in the programme including lung.

These plans are included in the local delivery plans for HEAT targets and will be reviewed regularly by the NHS board Detect Cancer Early project teams.

I attended a Scottish Parliament event hosted by the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation Committee on 9 January 2014 to raise awareness of the value of lung cancer nurses.

In response to the issues raised by a number of organisations around the role of specialist nurses, the Scottish Government will host regional seminars in early 2014 to explore current provision and the future direction of specialist nurse roles in Scotland. Representatives from The Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation and the National Lung Cancer Forum for nurses will be invited to participate.

This information is not held centrally.

The Scottish Government appreciates that the need for childcare does not stop when children start school.

That is why I have asked the Early Years Task Force to look at what sort of care could be offered for school aged children.

This question relates to operational matters that are the responsibility of the Scottish Court Service (SCS) corporate body. The question has been passed to the chief executive of the SCS who will reply in writing.