Chamber and committees

The National Reshaping the Medical Workforce Project Board, after extensive consultations, made recommendations to me about reductions in specialty trainee intake numbers for 2010 and 2011. A reshaping Working Group has been set up to help boards plan to reach their agreed target training establishments for each specialty and to track which posts are lost and what is put in their place. Boards which lose trainee input will receive the salary for the post to invest in replacement.

I have asked John Ewing, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service, to respond. His response is as follows:

If it is identified that an adult prisoner may need speech and language therapy as part of their case management or clinical care a referral for consideration can be made to the NHS board where the prison is located.

The Scottish Prison Service has a contract with NHS Forth Valley for the provision of a speech and language therapist to assess and provide appropriate support for young offenders referred by staff in HMYOI''s Polmont and Cornton Vale.

Speech and language therapy is only one possible means to support individuals with some forms of communication impairment and each prison provides a learning service which can also address speech and language difficulties.

NHS Fife made the decision to provide a minor injuries service at Victoria Hospital during out of hours periods in the interests of ensuring patient safety, avoiding the uncertainty involved in the previous contingency arrangements about when and from where full emergency services would be provided, and to establish the new single site working patterns that will be required when emergency services move to Victoria Hospital in early 2012 after completion of the major building project. The earlier problems were not caused by withdrawal of training numbers but by recruitment issues and gaps in rotas/lack of locums.

The following table shows the payments that have been made by NHS Education for Scotland (NES) to NHS boards to fund trainee doctors'' salaries in the period April 2010 to February 2011. These figures vary from month to month depending on rotations and exclude general practioner specialty training (GPSTs) in their periods in practice when NES pays salaries directly to the trainees.

April 2010 to February 2011

NHS Board	Fellows	Fixed Term Specialty Training Appointments (FTSTA)	Foundation Year 1 (FY1)	Foundation Year (FY2)	General Practioner (GP)	Special Registrar	Specialty Training (ST)	Total
Borders	31,182		372,240	247,192			1,976,414	2,627,028
Forth Valley*		9,525	1,045,656	893,262			4,499,103	6,447,546
Highland	182,108		735,456	825,846			3,309,602	5,053,012
Lothian*		190,500	3,325,344	4,661,536			25,999,537	34,176,917
Ayrshire and Arran*	18,319		943,008	1,423,602			6,286,126	8,671,055
Dumfries and Galloway			446,688	556,182			2,185,787	3,188,657
Fife*			918,192	834,273			5,502,062	7,254,527
Grampian*		15,875	2,527,860	2,067,985			13,205,066	17,816,786
Greater Glasgow and Clyde*		278,874	5,750,544	7,188,233			47,093,902	60,311,553
Lanarkshire*			1,513,776	2,008,435			9,315,000	12,837,211
National Services Scotland*							79,394	79,394
Orkney	40,400							40,400
Shetland*			24,816	61,798			154,572	241,186
Tayside*			2,083,545	2,869,111	213,063	64,666	12,344,320	17,574,705
Western Isles			49,632	123,596			193,215	366,443

*Note: Excludes payments for general practioner (GP) trainees when in practice as payment is made through NES GP Payroll.

Under the reshaping the medical workforce policy it has been agreed that salaries for training posts which have been disestablished as part of the project will be returned to NHSScotland boards to help to fund trained doctors to replace trainees. In the financial year 2010-11 NES has transferred a total of £682,692 from the NES baseline to NHS boards baseline for disestablished posts, although a number of these will be for Fixed Term Specialty Training Appointment (FTSTA) posts rather than specialty training (ST).

The next meeting of the Reshaping the Medical Workforce Project board will be on 17 March 2011. I will arrange for the minutes of that meeting and all future meetings to be placed on the SPICe website.

A four-year surveillance research project of the epidemiology of Foetal Alcohol Syndrome in Scotland, for which the Scottish Government is providing funding, began on 1 April 2010. The findings and analysis of the results will be published in a scientific paper at the end of the project in 2014. We would anticipate that the results will also be presented to the Scottish Paediatric Society, the British Association of Perinatal Medicine, the Neonatal Society, and the British Association for Community Child Health, the Royal College of Paediatrics Research and the European Society of Paediatric Research.

Please see following table:

Hits on chooselife.net from July 2008

 

The public consultation A new value-based approach to the pricing of branded medicines is still live and will close on 17 March 2011.

Along with the other Devolved Administrations and key stakeholders, Scottish Government officials will be fully involved in developing the new arrangements taking into account responses to the consultation. In these circumstances it would not be appropriate for the Scottish Government to submit a formal response to the consultation.

The Scottish Medicines Consortium is independent of Scottish Government.

Responses to the consultation A new value-based approach to the pricing of branded medicines are requested by 17 March 2011. Responses will be submitted directly to the Department of Health.

The recommendations for further research into the screening of staff are as highlighted in section 13 of NHS Scotland MRSA Screening Pathfinder Programme Final Report Volume 3: Staff Patient Acceptability.

These have been shared with the Scottish Infection Research Network ensuring that the academic community are engaged with these discussions and will be considered by the HAI Task Force.