Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government recognises the challenge of providing specialist chronic pain services for children and young people. All of the Service Improvement Groups/Managed Clinical Networks were asked to consider the needs of children and young people when establishing their local groups and where services are not available locally how they link to those provided in the larger centres. A dedicated sub-group of the National Chronic Pain Steering Group has been established to consider the needs of children and young people.

Information on the levels of funding for each NHS board chronic pain service is not held centrally. Scottish Ministers have made it clear that we expect chronic pain services to be the delivered through existing funding provided to boards in their annual allocations. The detailed planning and delivery of services is a matter for individual NHS boards taking account of their resident populations and assessment of needs.

The supporting information published alongside Healthcare Improvement Scotland’s ‘Chronic pain Services in Scotland: Where are we now?’ report, which is available at:

http://www.healthcareimprovementscotland.org/our_work/long_term_conditions/chronic_pain/where_are_we_now.aspx, notes that all of the chronic pain Service Improvement Groups/Managed Clinical Networks will make plans publicly available on their local pages of the new national chronic pain website from April 2014. The website can be accessed via: www.chronicpainscotland.org

NHS boards are required to include chronic pain service improvement in their local delivery plans for 2014. The Scottish Government will monitor progress through the NHS board annual review process.

The Healthcare Improvement Scotland ‘Chronic pain Services in Scotland: Where are we now?’ report noted that there were some staff vacancies during the period of the data collection which may have had an impact on service delivery at the time of reporting. At the date of publication (28 April 2014) a number of these vacancies had been filled.

Staff vacancies are an on-going consideration for NHS boards across all services and well established processes are in place to ensure that identified vacancies are filled.

Yes, the Universal Newborn Hearing Screening Programme is offered to all newborns in Scotland and has been since April 2005.

The Healthcare Improvement Scotland ‘Chronic pain Services in Scotland: Where are we now?’ report provides boards with a range of information to assist in the planning and delivery of services including information on the demographics of those accessing chronic pain services.

The musculoskeletal model and associated quality improvement work being rolled out nationally is designed to help people access early self-management support or appropriate intervention to facilitate early recovery and return to work. There is an evidence base that this early intervention prevents loss of function and will help to reduce the number of those suffering from chronic pain.

One of the recommendations of the Sensory Impairment Strategy is that local partnerships should audit service patterns on sensory impairment.

I refer the member to the answer to question S4W-20941 on 8 May 2014. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.

£2 million over two years has been allocated to the implementation of the Sensory Impairment Strategy.

An additional £2 million has been made available over two years for the implementation of the Sensory Impairment Strategy which was launched on 24 April 2014.

Implementation will be led by local partnerships and driven by local partnership leads with support from Scottish Government officials.

Outcome measures will be agreed to allow measurement and reporting of improvement.