Chamber and committees

The opinion of the Assistant Commissioner for Scotland and Northern Ireland was not sought before data sets were issued for collecting information on individual patients in relation to (a) community nursing and (b) community mental health services.

National Services Scotland does not routinely seek the opinion of The Information Commissioner’s Office before establishing a new data collection from NHS Scotland boards, unless the nature of the collection is substantially different from that in existing collections. The privacy impact assessment is used to indicate when wider consultation is required.

All projects should provide regular financial reports. This would include regular reporting of all costs including final outturn costs. This would include a breakdown of legal matters, external assessment or evaluations and consultancies.

I refer the member to the answer to question S4W-30432 on 21 March 2016. 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/Apps2/Business/PQA/Default.aspx.

The Scottish Government does not hold information centrally on how many NHS staff have been disciplined as a result of inappropriate access to information. Boards are however obliged to report significant information security incidents to the Scottish Government, and these could relate to personnel breaching patient or employee confidentiality. Since August 2014 there have been no such cases reported.

Portal access is shared between some NHS boards where patients may be commonly referred across those NHS board boundaries for treatment. The Scottish Government is promoting regional working in eHealth, and a key aspect of this is to create interoperable links between the NHS boards in the regions (West of Scotland, South and East of Scotland and North of Scotland) to enhance cross-boundary access.

Nevertheless, outside clinical portals, there are a variety of clinical systems which can be accessed by clinicians across Scotland including the Picture Archiving and Communication System, the Emergency Care Summary, the Key Information Summary and the SCI Store system providing access to electronic records if this is necessary.

The Scottish Government has noted the findings of the Alcohol Care Teams: to reduce acute hospital admissions and improve quality of care report.

Through the alcohol framework which was launched in 2009 the Scottish Government has put in place a number of significant measures aimed at reducing admissions associated with the misuse of alcohol, and to improve treatment services provided by the NHS in Scotland.

A privacy breach detection system is operational in all territorial boards. This is on top of the usual audit trails running on key clinical systems. Patients can ask for reassurance as to who is accessing their data (and why) and there are many ways in which this information can be provided. Simply providing raw audit trails would not on its own satisfy this requirement. Under the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 anyone has the right to ask for a copy of their personal health information.

The Scottish Government hold no information on the ICT qualifications of NHS board’s senior managers. It is the responsibility of NHS boards to ensure appropriately qualified staff are in place. All Scottish Government staff within the ICT profession are required to participate in an externally accredited career development scheme and make use of this system to record any ICT qualifications.

The information requested is not held centrally. Any information available on overspend and underspend for individual ICT projects would be held by the appropriate individual organisations across the public sector and it is a matter for those bodies to provide this information. This would apply to information on overspend and underspend of NHS board's projects in each year since 2007. It would be the responsibility of individual health board's to provide this information.