Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government has regular meetings with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS). Decisions on the allocation of its resources, including the number and location of control rooms, is a matter for the SFRS board.

Decisions on the allocation of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) resources, including the number and location of control rooms, are matters for the SFRS board.

Scottish Ministers set out priorities and objectives for SFRS to have regard to in the carrying out of its functions, in the Fire and Rescue Framework for Scotland, as detailed in Section 40 of the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 (as amended). In addition, Scottish Ministers have powers to direct SFRS, as detailed in section 42a of the Act.

My letter to the chair of NHS Highland of 10 September 2013 recorded my agreement with a view expressed at the NHS Highland Area Clinical Forum that there was a need for a rural recruitment strategy. As the letter also recorded, this followed discussions with the Forum about sustaining services in NHS Highland and with associated recruitment and retention challenges.

The Scottish Government is working closely with NHS boards to ensure that this vision becomes a reality for all communities, including remote and rural communities, so that everyone in Scotland receives safe, consistent, reliable and sustainable health care services, delivered to the highest standards.

In addition, we have given NHS Highland extra funding to develop and test a range of innovative ways of delivering healthcare in rural areas. On 28 January 2013 I announced that a pilot scheme by NHS Highland to develop models of healthcare delivery suitable for remote and rural areas was to be set up. The scheme, subsequently launched on 28 August 2013 in Campbeltown by the Minister for Public Health, is providing £1.5 million covering the three years 2013-14 – 2015-16 to test new ways of working and explore approaches to building sustainable health and care services. The scheme aims to develop and test new models of healthcare which contribute to a sustainable rural health care system, and to find ways to attract more GPs to rural areas.

With regard to recruitment and retention challenges across NHS Scotland, Everyone Matters, the 2020 Workforce Vision for NHS Scotland, identifies a number of areas for developing a more sustainable workforce, including supporting new and emerging service delivery models; ensuring high quality regional and local workforce data; and developing a Scottish investment plan to set the strategic direction for investing in the healthcare workforce now and in the future.

The Scottish Government employs a Chief Health Professions Officer (CHPO) who provides policy and professional advice on all allied health professions, including speech and language therapy. The CHPO works closely with a network of national leads (two of whom are speech and language therapists), Allied Health Professions (AHP) Directors in NHS boards and with the Allied Health Professions Federation which represents all AHP professional bodies including the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Speech and language therapists work closely with individuals and their parents, families and carers where appropriate to ensure that the support, advice or intervention offered is appropriate to the needs of the individual, this can include supporting the individual to self-manage.

The Scottish Government’s 20:20 Workforce Vision: Everyone Matters recognises the key role the workforce will play in responding to the challenges that NHS Scotland is facing, however it is for NHS boards to assess and plan to meet the needs of their local population, including planning for the appropriate workforce to be in place.

In addition, the Chief Health Professions Officer commissioned NHS Education for Scotland (NES) to undertake a workforce review to scope workforce intelligence about a number of allied health professions (AHP). Initial reports covering speech and language therapy and occupational therapy have now been completed and will shortly be presented to the AHP strategic workforce group.

A system can be designed and implemented in a manner deemed fit for purpose and resilient, and yet still suffer from an unforeseen incident.

The position of Scottish Government and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde remains unchanged. The eHealth Strategy makes clear the commitment for all health boards to become ‘paper-light’ in a controlled and incremental fashion because of the considerable benefits that this brings (including better service continuity and information availability compared to paper). Paper workarounds do have their place in certain circumstances, but increasingly health boards are deploying more resilient ICT which means that information can still be available from alternative digital sources. Each board has business continuity plans, and associated guidance in this area.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde runs dual active data centres, separated by 14 km and the River Clyde. These are linked by multiple super-high speed data connections, making the concept of a passive disaster recovery site redundant. This design is accepted best practice for modern data centres.

A full Active Directory recovery was not performed due to not having an environment where this could be done safely. This is now being re-assessed. However, the backups have been used previously to perform granular recovery of Active Directory objects in the live active directory.