Chamber and committees

There is a requirement on NHS boards to ensure that NHS general dental services are provided by independent contractors where possible, and are not duplicated by the Public Dental Service.

The £25,000 recruitment allowance is only payable in the three island board areas, where recruitment has historically been challenging.

Data on the number of people diagnosed with hepatitis C and admitted to hospital for the first time with end-stage liver disease (ESLD) or hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) between 2007 and 2012 are detailed in Table 1. Data for 2012 are provisional as they are not yet published.

Table 1: Number of individuals diagnosed with hepatitis C in Scotland who have been admitted to hospital with ESLD and HCC and number of bed days associated with their stay for those with ESLD and HCC, 2007-2013

	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012*
First time hospitalised for ESLD and HCC	123	131	148	148	153	147

As at 30 April 2014 the estimated number of patients at Dumfries Dental Centre, Lochmaben, and Sanquhar, in receipt of routine general dental services, was as follows:

Registration with a NHS dentist will be maintained for all these patients.

Delivering safe and effective care remains a priority for the Scottish Government. SIGN develops guidelines for effective practice, based on current evidence. We expect all health boards to ensure robust systems are in place to support the reliable delivery of high quality care. There are no plans for the Scottish Patient Safety Programme to require boards to incorporate SIGN guidelines into publically available local protocols.

I refer the member to the answer to question S4W-21407 on 11 June 2014. 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

There are several reasons why I do not consider that collecting such information as part of the GP contract requirements would be sensible or useful.

At present, much GP training is vocational, and involves practitioners gaining experiences in a variety of care settings in order to gain competencies in managing patients, whether children or adults. I consider it would be unhelpful to assume that a GP who has not completed a formal paediatric or child health post, but has been vocationally trained, is somehow less competent than a GP who did have such experience in a secondary care setting. This is important as our approach to the new GP contract is not to propose changes with current GP training requirements, which is more properly for the General Medical Council (GMC) as regulator of the profession, and the Royal College of General Practitioners.

We are aware of concerns that GP training in paediatric and child health is not as effective as it should be, and it is important that this be addressed. This is one issue highlighted within Professor David Greenaway’s independent review of the future shape of medical training in the United Kingdom, where he has made several recommendations on how improvements might be achieved, including that GP training should be better designed to equip them with more enhanced knowledge and skills based upon broad patient care themes e.g. child health, women’s health, mental health etc. that will enable them to work more seamlessly across primary and secondary care settings. Any restructured medical training will need to be agreed and implemented on a UK basis, with the support of the GMC, health boards, patients, and Royal Colleges etc., and UK-wide discussions on how best to take forward the recommendations are now underway.

The methodology used by and the findings of the University of Dundee’s Fatalities Investigation and Review Studies Team will be considered by the group being set up to develop a national system for reviewing child deaths.

The Scottish Government has confirmed in meetings and engagements with all the professional healthcare regulatory bodies that it is committed to continued four country working on healthcare regulation and it will seek to work in cooperation with Westminster and the devolved administrations, to ensure that health professional regulation is maintained in the best interests of patient safety and the consistent treatment of healthcare professionals through the current professional healthcare regulatory bodies.

The regulation of all health professionals will become the responsibility of the Scottish Parliament on independence. The Scottish Government will seek to work in continued cooperation with Westminster and the devolved administrations, to ensure that health professional regulation is maintained in the best interests of patient safety and the consistent treatment of healthcare professionals.

The Scottish Government will seek to maintain the current professional healthcare regulatory bodies, which are funded by fees from registrants, which will continue to operate in Scotland after independence.

All prisoners receive a health check and can also self-refer to the GP at the health centre in prison, as in the community. A prisoner would not receive any specific assessment, as with the general population.