Chamber and committees

As stated in Getting it Right for Every Child in Kinship and Foster Care, the appropriate placement limit depends on the circumstances of the individual carer. The Looked After Children (Scotland) regulations will require a fostering panel to approve the maximum number of children that a foster carer may have in their care at any one time.

We will issue guidance to support the updated Looked After Children (Scotland) regulations, which will be brought before Parliament later this year.

The Care Commission regulates all children''s social care services, including fostering and adoption services. The Care Commission will inspect local authority fostering services and monitor compliance with the regulations.

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

Provisional information on the number of children (aged over 14 and under 16) who were held in a Scottish Prison or Young Offenders Institution under Unruly Certificate arrangements in each quarter of 2007 is given in the following table:

 

No child under 14 years was held in Scottish prisons during 2007.

Information for the first quarter of 2008 will not be available until after the publication of the final 2007-08 data in the Prison Statistics Scotland 2007-08 Bulletin on 29 August 2008.

All data on cases of Clostridium difficile Associated Disease (CDAD) are published by NHS board. The latest quarterly report for the period January 2008 - March 2008 was published on 2 July 2008 and is available at:

http://www.hps.scot.nhs.uk/ewr/article.aspx.

The Scottish Government also wrote to all NHS boards on 18 June to ask them to review their Clostridium difficile data by hospital over the previous six months and to report their findings back to Health Protection Scotland by the end of July. As a result of this exercise we shall examine how the surveillance systems can be improved. I will update members if anything arises from that exercise.

I refer the member to the answer to question S3W-13894 on 16 June 2008. 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/webapp/wa.search.

Patients on a waiting list who are transferred within the same NHS board to another specialty (removal reason code 50) or transferred to another NHS Board area (removal reason code 59) do not have their "waiting time clock" stopped or reset to zero.

We expect NHS boards to ensure that all patients are seen and treated within current waiting time standards. Where a patient is required to be transferred to another hospital, we would expect the patient to participate in any decision about their hospital care.

New contractual arrangements for the provision of NHS dental services have been introduced in England and Wales. Following a consultation in 2003, a decision was taken by the previous administration to retain item of service fees in Scotland, ie a fee for each item of treatment undertaken. The differences in the arrangements for NHS dental services in England and Wales and those in Scotland have resulted in the different patient charging systems which now exist and the disparity in the maximum patient charge. There are no current plans to review the maximum patient charge for a single course of NHS dental treatment in Scotland.

The information requested is set out in the Scottish Government’s Finance Circular 1-2008, which details the Local Government Finance Settlements covering the period 2008-11. A copy of this circular is available in the Scottish Parliament Information Reference Centre (Bib. number 45732).

The allocations for 2009-10 and 2010-11 are currently provisional and will be subject to Parliamentary approval when the Local Government Finance (Scotland) Orders 2009 and 2010 are presented to Parliament early in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

The optimal use of donated blood involves a balanced approach between carrying out only necessary transfusions and implementing blood use avoidance strategies. The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) has invested in a wide range of optimal blood use strategies, co-ordinated within the Better Blood Transfusion Programme (BBTP), to encourage delivery within and by NHS boards.

The Scottish Clinical Transfusion Advisory Committee has considered cell salvage in some detail at meetings over the last 18 months. While acknowledging that perioperative cell salvage is an important part of the Better Blood Transfusion initiatives, it is likely to be applicable to a minority of blood recipients.

SNBTS actively supports and encourages the use of intra-operative cell salvage (IOCS) and provides £113,000 (recurring) funding for this purpose. Part of this allocation provides funding for a specialist practitioner in operating theatre blood conservation at NHS Lothian, who takes the national lead in Scotland on intra-operative blood matters. Over the past four years, several NHS boards have also used BBTP funds to purchase IOCS equipment.

The UK Cell Salvage Action Group, which SNBTS is actively involved with, is in the process of establishing a national audit database for IOCS.

I am currently considering the evidence gathered at this stage of the domiciliary oxygen therapy service (DOTS) review and am not yet in a position to announce decisions on the future shape of the Service. The review has been broad-ranging and has assessed a number of important issues.

BOC supplies oxygen to NHS community pharmacies in Scotland. Manufacturing problems at the French company which supplies BOC have been the cause of a temporary shortage of portable cylinders across the UK. This shortage has affected supplies of the Drug Tariff-listed DD cylinders available to community pharmacies across Scotland, and PD cylinders which require separate headsets have been issued to some patients over the past few months.

We have been assured by BOC that the supply problems which led to this situation are easing. PD cylinders will be withdrawn as more of the integrated headset DD cylinders come on stream.