Chamber and committees

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.

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.

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.

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.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde regards its IT Information Systems as critical health infrastructure. Accordingly it would not be appropriate to put detailed systems documentation (especially Information Security) into the public domain.

Information processing has been completed. All national returns have been provided and all patient transactions processed. No business or patient data was lost.

Native Windows Server Backup was not being used prior to the incident. Symantec Backup Exec was used to backup the domain controllers. It was Symantec Backup Exec which was used to recover Active Directory.

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.