Chamber and committees

Every NHS board, including NHS 24, is subject to a process of public review and scrutiny as part of the annual review process. The forthcoming annual review of NHS 24, covering the 2007-08 period, will take place on Tuesday 12 August 2008.

In addition, NHS 24 publishes a regular chief executive’s report on it’s website. This report reviews the performance of NHS 24 on a range of targets and indicators.

This is an operational matter for NHS 24.

NHS 24 is almost seven years into a 10 year contract with British Telecommunications (BT) for the delivery of the organisation’s telephony infrastructure and service. As part of the delivery of this service, NHS 24 and BT are in constant discussions about the ongoing operation and improvements which can be made to both the service provided by BT and the contract.

The net operating costs, or running costs, of NHS 24 are set out in their annual accounts each year and laid before the Parliament.

As at June 2008, there are 1,418 staff delivering NHS 24 services in both frontline and support roles across Scotland. Of these, 1,192 staff (84.1% of total) work across a variety of skill sets, and have direct contact with patients.

This includes 657 frontline clinical staff, such as clinical service managers, team leaders, nursing staff, pharmacy advisors, dental nurses and mental health advisors who receive and make calls directly to patients and their carers.

In addition, 513 call handlers and senior call handlers and 22 health information advisors also engage with patients and their carers by telephone.

NHS 24 operates a low rate 08454 number. This means that no matter which operator the caller uses when phoning from a landline, the caller only incurs a minimal cost. As every caller would have their own operator and subsequently a call package or contract tailored for their use, no single value for a call to NHS 24 can be given, although NHS 24 does cover the more substantial part of the cost.

Similarly the cost of calls to NHS 24 from mobile phones are dependent on the call tariff levied by the caller’s specific network operator. NHS 24 have a policy of calling mobile phone users back if they have insufficient credit on their phones to cover the time period necessary for their call to NHS 24.

I was pleased to learn that Ross Finnie shares my concerns about the impact cheap alcohol has on alcohol misuse in Scotland.

I have already announced the government’s intention to crack down on irresponsible promotions in supermarkets and other off-sales premises. We will shortly consult on the detail of these proposals and once we have considered the outcome of the consultation, I shall bring forward regulations which I hope all parties will be able to support.

The following changes to the blood donation testing regime have been introduced by the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service over the past decade:

By April 1999 all blood for transfusion was tested negative for hepatitis C by both antibody and nucleic acid testing (NAT).

NAT testing for HIV/AIDS was introduced in November 2002

Testing for Human T-Lymphotropic Virus 1 (HTLV-1) was introduced in August 2002

Malaria antibody testing of donors with a risk of malaria was introduced in 2004.

Testing of apheresis donors for anti-hepatitis B core began in March 2005 and testing of platelets for bacteria using the BActAlert system started in 2004.

Various exclusion criteria for donors have been introduced over the past decade as a risk reduction measure against variant CJD.

Visitors to the United States must wait at least 28 days after their return to donate as a precaution against West Nile Virus transmission.

The Scottish Government considers it is important for any nucleic acid blood testing (NAT) regime to specify both hepatitis C virus and HIV. This is the regime carried out by the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service to test blood supplies in Scotland. They introduced NAT testing for hepatitis C in 1999 and for HIV in November 2002 following an increase in the number of donations detected as positive for anti-HIV antibody.

It is not possible for the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service to introduce nucleic acid testing as its “standard” test because the UK Blood Safety and Quality Regulations require an antibody test for HIV and hepatitis C to be performed on each donation as the “standard” test.

SNBTS use nucleic acid testing as an additional test to improve the safety of the Scottish blood supply.

Nucleic acid detection of viruses in blood, in general, detects positive donations at an earlier stage after the infective episode than antibody or antigen tests. For HIV, for example, a nucleic acid test in general becomes positive after about 11 days after exposure whereas for the current HIV anti-body test this is around 21 days after exposure.

The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service introduced nucleic acid testing for HIV in November 2002 as an additional test to improve the safety of the Scottish blood supply.