Chamber and committees

To date 28.4 whole time equivalent pharmacists have been appointed attached to GP practices or clusters of practices since the primary care funding to recruit up to 140 pharmacists was announced.

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.

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.

The Scottish Government's response Renewing Scotland's Public Services: priorities for reform in response to the Christie Commission was published in September 2011. We continue to look at how we can further reduce duplication across NHS boards.

The CHI and Child Health Transformation Programme will modernise a number of systems currently hosted on the mainframe platform. The programme will take a number of years to deliver and realise all benefits. One of the first elements of the programme of work is the procurement of new CHI and Child Health Solutions. The procurement is planned to run until September 2016 and a number of key activities and milestones have been completed:

The programme’s governance arrangements including a programme board, two project boards and a technical design authority have been fully established and a schedule of meetings is in place.

Key documentation is in place including the programme brief, procurement strategy and procurement project initiation document.

The scope of the procurement has been defined.

The procurement project team has been resourced.

CMS Cameron McKenna has been appointed as external legal advisers to lead the contractual negotiations.

The procurement requirements have been validated.

An Official Journal of the European Union notice and pre-qualification questionnaire were issued to suppliers on 13 May 2015.

A long-list of suppliers was identified on 7 July 2015.

An issue invitation to negotiate and invitation to submit initial bid including the statement of requirements were issued to bidders on 31 July 2015.

Bidder responses were scored by NHS evaluation teams and a short-list of suppliers was identified on 30 October 2015.

An invitation to the negotiation phase was issued to bidders and negotiations commenced on 16 November 2015.

In addition to negotiations with bidders product demonstrations have been arranged and reference site calls held.

Cost to date

The full programme costs as at 31 January 2016 are as follows:

In-house resource: £ 196,420

External IT expertise £1,831,165

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.

The following table shows how many GP practices are on a 2C arrangement in each NHS board.

*One practice will leave 2C arrangements 1 May 2016

The Scottish Government is not aware of any cases of where a Caldicott guardian is also in a senior management role in ICT. The launch of the NHSScotland Information Security Policy Framework, and the need to appoint Senior Information Risk Owners and improve internal appointing is making it far less likely for any conflicts of interest to occur.

The circumstances when a patient’s waiting time can be reset to zero are clearly set out in The Patient Rights (Treatment Time Guarantee) (Scotland) Regulations 2012. The appropriate Regulations are 5 and 6(2). A copy of the legislation can be found at: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ssi/2012/110/contents/made.

Since the report was published in 2010 the majority of NHS boards have made significant progress, with clinical portals becoming a core strategic capability and making a significant impact on the availability of the nationally agreed 14 priority clinical information items. Clinical portals are used daily by a large number of clinicians. All NHS boards have on-going work to add information sources and widen access to their clinical portals to support patient flows and clinical need, including across NHS board boundaries. The Scottish Government made an up-front allocation of £4.85 million to the clinical portal project. NHS boards have also been using a proportion (determined by the NHS board) of their annual eHealth Strategic Fund allocation from the Scottish Government to enhance their clinical portals.

On telehealth, both national and local developments have continued apace. The use of video conferencing equipment for remote consultations is now routine in many service areas, particularly in rural parts of Scotland. This is facilitated by the National Video Conferencing Service, which links all NHS sites through a central booking system. This was largely local investment with national coordination, so the Scottish Government does not have details on costs incurred by local health boards. For home and mobile health monitoring, significant technology changes over the last few years (with the rise in tablets and smartphones) has led to a change in strategy to ensure cost effectiveness. Through the Technology Enabled Care Programme, the Scottish Government is now investing circa £9 million per annum (from 2015) to further expand and embed the use of technology in the routine delivery of healthcare at home. This includes the development of a national model for home and mobile health monitoring, which will be tested and further refined during 2016.