Chamber and committees

The Chief Scientist, Health post became vacant at the end of September 2010 when Professor Sir John Savill ended his secondment to the Scottish Government from Edinburgh University. The vacancy was advertised in October 2011. A shortlisting meeting was held on 14 November 2011 and interviews were held on 12 January 2012. The successful candidate will be announced shortly.

I refer the member to the answer to question S4W-05121 on 2 February 2012. 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.

From 6 April 2012 onwards there will be a phased roll-out of InPS Vision to all nine NHS health boards with prisons. The rollout will take approximately six weeks.

The total funding transferred to NHS boards for the replacement of the Gpass system in prisons is £1,444,100.

The introduction of NHS Education for Scotland’s Knowledge Network in 2010 provided NHS staff with access to a vast range of knowledge and learning resources available to NHSScotland from a single website. The Network brings together a range of articles, books and journals, guidelines, and more. Licence fees are paid direct to copyright owners to enable all NHSScotland staff to access journals and books electronically through the Knowledge Network. This electronic access has largely replaced the need for on-site photocopying of print materials. In the small proportion of cases where print copies are needed, NHSScotland staff can obtain copyright cleared copies from the British Library or via a permissions agent.

Because NES has developed the Knowledge Network and is actively and successfully promoting use of copyright licensed electronic resources through this route, we do not believe that a blanket copyright licence for print publications is the appropriate mechanism for NHSScotland.

The Scottish Government, working with NHSScotland, has comprehensive plans in place to ensure that health professionals have access to all relevant materials.

NHSScotland staff have access to the Knowledge Network - a vast electronic database of articles, books, journals, guidelines, and other sources of information for healthcare staff. Significant licence fees are paid to copyright owners to enable NHSScotland staff to access journals, books and other reference materials through the Knowledge Network. NHSScotland staff can therefore access these resources in compliance with copyright law from a single website, wherever they are. The Knowledge Network has superseded much of the use of print copyrighted material, and its scope and use have increased considerably over the years. This has greatly decreased the need to photocopy documents in print form.

In the small proportion of cases where NHSScotland staff require a resource not on The knowledge Network, NHSScotland has put a system in place whereby they may request “copyright cleared” copies of materials from the British Library. In the rare situations where the British Library route will not produce a copy in sufficient time, NHSScotland has secured the services of a permissions agent to obtain copyright permission direct from the copyright holder. The Scottish Government has made funding available to NHSScotland for both these purposes.

In Scotland national prescribing data is collated and published by the Information Services Division (ISD) of NHS National Services Scotland.

ISD already provide more detailed prescribing information on a monthly basis to NHS boards, Community Health Partnerships (CHPs) and GP practices via an NHS web-based system. This is further supplemented by NHS boards who analyse the data, identify prescribing trends and variations and provide GPs practices with tailored data and support in order to ensure cost effective prescribing.

More detailed prescribing data by GP practice is also available from ISD on request via the Information Request Service. In addition, ISD publishes detailed prescription cost analysis data for the whole of Scotland annually together with higher level summaries on a quarterly basis.

The prescription data currently published in England consists of a data file containing a list of medicines and costs per GP practice and requires specialist data-handling software to allow it to be interpreted. It is part of the UK Government’s wide ranging commitment to publish key data on health, schools, criminal courts and transport.

In Scotland, our approach to publication of information is to ensure that this is done in a way which is sensitive to both patient and prescriber confidentiality and is useful and informative to users. ISD have a NHS data warehouse which supports systems to record, validate and report prescribing data to the NHS. In addition, the Chief Scientist Office is working to create a world leading system of data linkage in order to evaluate healthcare interventions and services, provide drug safety surveillance, advance research and to drive economic growth.

No, however, my officials continue to work with the Medical and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) which is responsible for the regulation of medical devices in the UK.

A medical device alert prepared by the Medical and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA) on this issue was circulated in September 2010 to NHS boards by NHS National Services Scotland’s Incident Report and Investigation Centre.

This advised NHS boards to put in place arrangements for all patients with ASR hip replacements to be clinically reviewed.

A number of NHS boards in Scotland are already implementing “intentional” or “care” rounding approaches and will be evaluating the impact on the quality of care and patient experience and a project is currently being led by Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) to test and implement intentional rounding to complement work already being taken forward by NHS boards.

In addition, “Releasing Time to Care” has been rolled out across all NHS boards in Scotland and incorporates a series of evidence based approaches to ensure that the time that nurses spend with patients is maximised.

An overarching principal of both the National Standards for Dementia Care and the Clinical Standards for Older People in Acute Care is that there should be no discrimination on the basis of age, but that the specific needs of people at different stages of life should be recognised, we would not therefore encourage boards to limit the introduction of intentional rounding to patients over the age of 70 or to specify that rounds should be carried out hourly, but rather that care rounds should be planned to meet the needs of individual patients.