Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is very concerned at the potential loss of the delivery services provided by the Scottish Resource Centre. We are in regular contact with them and we are continuing to explore every avenue to help secure future funding.

Our approach to Equality Impact Assessment (EQIA) focuses on ensuring that analysis of equality evidence is embedded from the beginning of the policy making cycle, and shapes the policy on an ongoing basis. As such we expect policies to be influenced by the process of impact assessment and analysis. There are 33 Directorates in the Scottish Government and we do not collate information centrally on amendments made to policies during this cycle.

We do however provide centralised on-line publication of equality impact assessments from across the Scottish Government and these can be accessed at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/People/Equality/18507/EQIASearch

The following case studies provide three examples of instances where policies informed by equality impact assessment have led to specific actions.

Patients Rights Bill EQIA:

During consultation on the Bill one of the issues raised was that without the right help and support some groups of people - younger people, older people (especially those with dementia), disabled people (especially those with learning disabilities and mental health problems) - will find it difficult to enforce their rights. After consideration of the impact on the equality groups it was decided to allocate funding to support the provision of advocacy services to ensure that those who need assistance in upholding their rights can access the appropriate support.

In addition, results from the consultation also suggested that disabled people face significant problems in accessing health care, often due to access and communication issues. Provisions in the Patient Rights Bill place NHS bodies under a duty to allow and encourage patients to participate as fully as possible in decisions relating to their health and well being. After consideration of the equality issues (in particular the impact on disabled people, and people whose first language is not English) the Scottish Government decided to provide funding to NHS Health Scotland to support the development of translation, interpreting and communication services (TICS). Investing in the TICS infrastructure will help to ensure that all patients are aware of their rights, are communicated with in an appropriate manner, and are involved in decisions about their care.

Drugs Strategy EQIA:

In developing the EQIA for the national drugs strategy, a lack of evidence about ethnic minority communities'' use of drugs and treatment services was identified. It identified that 99.3% of new patients accessing treatments were not from ethnic minority groups. Anecdotal evidence suggested that drug taking patterns amongst ethnic minority communities were different to those in other communities which, along with the perceived shame associated with drug taking in many ethnic minority communities, meant that people were not accessing services. Officials explored the potential gaps, barriers and needs in service provision for people from ethnic minority communities. It transpired that drug use amongst these communities was as prevalent per head of population as those in other communities. However, of the 227 drugs services operating in Scotland, only one specialised in supporting people from minority ethnic communities. In response, the Drug Policy Unit commenced work to help make services more accessible to ethnic minority communities.

Low-cost Initiative for First Time Buyers EQIA:

The overarching purpose of the Low-cost Initiative for First Time Buyers Shared Equity Schemes is to help first time buyers, on low to moderate incomes, achieve their home ownership aspirations. A key finding from the EQIA for this policy was that Muslims can find it difficult to buy a home if they want to ensure their purchase is compliant with their religious law and beliefs. Therefore, in order to make the benefits of our policy more accessible and reach a greater number of people, we started working with the Islamic Finance Council to make it easier for lenders to offer Shariah-compliant home purchase plans to buyers.

The requested figures are provided in the following table:

Financial Year	(a) NHS Tayside “ Total prescriptions dispensed	(b) NHS Tayside “Prescriptions dispensed per person on GP lists
2009-10	6,635,000	15.86
2008-09	6,404,000	15.40
2007-08	6,146,000	14.83

 

For 2011-12, NHS Tayside has been allocated £4.4 million for loss of prescription charge income.

Like all boards, NHS Tayside has an Efficient Government target for 2011-12 of 3%. This equates to around £17.9 million of the board''s general allocation of £596.4 million.

In 2011-12, NHS Tayside have been allocated £6.2 million from the Change Fund in the initial revenue resource allocation.

In 2010-11 the initial recurring baseline formula allocation for NHS Tayside was £592.9 million. As usually occurs, some recurrent adjustments were required to be made to this baseline allocation throughout the year.

The most notable adjustment in 2010-11 was that the initial allocation for 2010-11 included funding for cost of capital. This was subsequently stripped out, as per HM Treasury guidance, boards no longer have to factor in a cost of capital charge (therefore there is no impact on boards not getting funding cover for this area). This decreased boards'' allocation by £12 million and when factoring in some other less significant adjustments, the restated baseline allocation totalled £580.9 million. When using the restated baseline allocation of £580.9 in 2010-11, the uplift is close to 3%.

In 2011-12 the initial recurring baseline formula allocation for NHS Tayside was £596.4 million. This represents a 2.9% increase on 2010-11 restated baseline figure.

The UK Government is the state party with responsibility for co-ordinating input from devolved administrations and publishing a UK progress report. We are fully engaged in the process, first contributing information to the UK Government in November 2010 to enable them to produce a first draft UK report. We expect to receive this soon for our comment and further input.

A comprehensive update on our cross-government work to tackle occupational segregation was included in the Scottish Government''s Gender Equality Scheme annual report 2010 (at Section 2.3). We are currently updating that information for the 2011 annual report, which will be published soon on our website.

Scottish Government also published reports in July 2010, which give an overview of progress made across public authorities on tackling the Gender Equality Duty Ministerial Priorities - one of which is occupational segregation.

These (published) reports can be found via links on our occupational segregation webpage:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/People/Equality/18500/OccSeg.

This information is not held centrally.