Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring a culture of openness and transparency within our NHS services, which actively welcomes all forms of feedback as a tool for continuous improvement. We have therefore taken a number of actions to support NHS boards to encourage, handle and respond to feedback and complaints. The Scottish Government has:

Issued updated guidance Can I Help You? on handling and learning from feedback, comments, concerns or complaints about NHS services.

Provided funding for staff training, and to encourage and promote all forms of feedback, including complaints.

Established the independent Patient Advice and Support Service to advise and support people to provide feedback, make comments, raise concerns or make a complaint, and continued to fund the Scottish Mediation Network.

Following receipt of the first round of boards’ annual feedback and complaints reports, the Scottish Government commissioned the Scottish Health Council’s Listening and Learning report published on 30 April 2014. The report’s recommendations have been accepted and are being actioned by boards.

Through The Patient Rights (Feedback, Comments, Concerns and Complaints) (Scotland) Directions 2012, the Scottish Government has required each relevant NHS body to publish annual reports which provide evidence that action has been taken, or is planned, as a result of feedback, comments, concerns and complaints. The reports are required to be sent to Scottish Ministers.

The Scottish Government issued additional guidance to NHS boards in May 2014, to assist them with their reports for 2013-14.

The Patient Rights (Complaints Procedure and Consequential Provisions) (Scotland) Regulations 2012 continues to apply to all health services, including those within the integration scheme. The Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Integration Scheme) (Scotland) Regulations 2014 require health boards and local authorities to agree a process for complaints in relation to integrated services.

At the latest NHS continuing healthcare census (March 2014) there were 385 category A patients in care homes and 12 category B patients. Costs are not collected centrally.

In announcing our acceptance of the recommendations of the Independent Review of NHS Continuing Healthcare on 8 May 2014, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing made it clear that anyone currently eligible would not be disadvantaged. It is anticipated that these patients will, subject to review, remain where they are currently being cared for and therefore not move home or to a hospital.

The Scottish Government meets regularly with the office of the Scottish Public Services Ombudsman (SPSO) and the Scottish Human Rights Commissioner to discuss areas of mutual interest. The most recent meeting with SPSO was held on 21 November 2014, to discuss the recommendations from the Scottish Health Council’s Listening and Learning report. There have been no specific meetings with the SHRC to discuss sections 14 and 15 of the Patient Rights (Scotland) Act 2011.

<>In addition to the answer provided for S4W-23317 on 3 December 2014, the first round of annual complaints and feedback reports were published in 2013. They informed an analysis of key themes published in the Scottish Health Council’s Review of NHS Boards’ Annual Reporting on Feedback, Comments, Concerns and Complaints 2012/13, in January 2014.

NHS boards annual complaints and feedback reports for 2013-14 have been received by the Scottish Government and are publicly available on boards’ websites.

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

Forensic mental health assessments are carried out on patients in a variety of settings, for example as voluntary patients or by GPs, and this information would not be passed to the Scottish Government.

<>NHS Scotland uses the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) guidelines to inform clinical practice. In the area of antibiotic prophylaxis this would be SIGN guideline 104: Antibiotic prophylaxis in surgery which was first published in 2008 and recently revised in April 2014. Please see the following link: http://www.sign.ac.uk/pdf/sign104.pdf

Healthcare Improvement Scotland has a strategic relationship with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and is the lead health board for NICE outputs in NHS Scotland. While Healthcare Improvement Scotland does provide advice for NHS Scotland on NICE single technology appraisals and NICE multiple technology appraisals, no advice is provided on NICE clinical guidelines and quality standards and these have no status in Scotland.

The Patient Rights (Feedback, Comments, Concerns and Complaints) (Scotland) Directions 2012 came into force in April 2012. No directions have been issued to individual boards. A number of directions that all boards have to comply with were included in the updated Can I Help You? guidance which was issued to boards by the Scottish Government in March 2012.

The Scottish Government’s position is that any security incident in NHSScotland that leads to breach of patient confidentiality is unacceptable. But it must be stressed that the vast majority of information security incidents reported internally by boards are at the negligible or minor end of the spectrum. These all require investigation and action such as changes in process, advice and/or discipline of staff, but do not necessarily lead to any impact on patient confidentiality. For this reason the high number of cases reported in The Sunday Post would bear no relation to the number of cases that actually require reporting by boards to the Scottish Information Commissioner. The Scottish Government does not hold statistics on cases reported directly by health boards to the Information Commissioner’s Office, but since August 2014 has introduced a new approach to categorising incidents, and has started to record figures and details on significant information security incidents (the figure is 1 for the period August 2014 to present).