Chamber and committees

All published health statistics, including those for teenage pregnancies broken down by health board, are available on the SHOW website at:http://www.show.scot.nhs.uk/isd/publications/publications.htm. The Information and Statistics Division of the Common Services Agency, which gathers and publishes annual teenage pregnancy statistics, must rely on returns from hospitals. Because of delays in returns from some hospitals, the last year for which full figures are available is 1999.

The Clinical Standards Board for Scotland will undertake the process of external peer review of its diabetes standards during 2003. It will then publish a report on each visit, including a detailed assessment of performance against each standard, at the same time as it publishes a national report giving an overview of performance across Scotland against all the standards.Further information is to be found in the Scottish Diabetes Survey, an annual snapshot of diabetes care based on local diabetes registers. The results of the 2001 survey were published in November 2001. The report of the 2002 survey should be published before the end of the year.

The Scottish Diabetes Framework seeks to raise standards of care and support for all people with diabetes. Ethnic minority groups, parents with young children and carers are all recognised as groups with particular needs, in terms of coping with diabetes.

None.

It would be for the courts to determine in the circumstances of any particular case, legal liability in relation to any medical damage caused by fluoridation.

NHSScotland should take account of advice and evidence from the Health Technology Board for Scotland and ensure that recommended drugs or treatments are made available to meet clinical need. Likewise, individual clinicians should take account of evidence-based guidance when exercising their clinical judgement.

The Medicines Control Agency (MCA) is the UK-wide medicines regulatory authority responsible for ensuring the safety, quality and efficacy of medicines available on the UK market.The MCA has advised that the decision to grant a marketing authorisation in the UK for a product containing levonorgestrel 0.75 mg (emergency hormonal contraceptive) followed advice from the Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM) who were satisfied as to the product's safety, quality and efficacy. The evidence considered by the CSM included two World Health Organisation sponsored pivotal studies. One study involving approximately 2,000 women in 14 countries including the UK, has been published in the Lancet (1998). The other, published in Human Reproduction (1993), involved 880 women. Other supporting data not in the public domain are confidential to the application.Evidence of safety was also taken into account when the CSM considered the proposal for levonorgestrel 0.75 mg to be available without a prescription. A note of the CSM meeting of 23 March 2000 is available on their website:www.mca.gov.uk/aboutagency/regframework/csm/csmhome.htm.The Yellow Card Scheme underpins drug safety monitoring in the UK. Under the scheme, doctors, pharmacists, dentists and coroners are encouraged to report any suspected adverse drug reactions to the CSM and the MCA, jointly responsible for running the scheme.

It is not possible to monitor repeated use of Emergency Hormonal Contraception (EHC) from data available centrally. EHC may be sold under the supervision of a pharmacist to women aged 16 and over without a prescription. Data on medicines purchased privately through community pharmacies without a prescription is not collected centrally.EHC remains available free of charge on NHS prescription. Data collected centrally on prescribed items dispensed in the community is not patient-specific.In all their actions, health professionals will have regard to issues of patient confidentiality.

Many factors affect teenage pregnancy. It is not possible easily to isolate any effect the availability of emergency contraception may have had.

Information is not held centrally in the form requested. Individual NHS boards and trusts are responsible for deciding what resources are necessary for effective infection control, and for identifying these resources within the increased allocations made available to all NHS boards this year. All boards and trusts are clear that infection control is an extremely important goal for the NHS, and that their performance against the recently-agreed infection control standards developed by the Clinical Standards Board for Scotland will be reported publicly by the end of 2002.In addition to expenditure by NHS trusts, the Department has, in 2001-02, allocated additional funding of £0.2 million for infection control nurse training and £0.5 million to support the Scottish Centre for Infection and Environmental Health in implementing the national surveillance framework for Healthcare Associated Infection.