Chamber and committees

Aberdeenshire Council's original intention was to develop an internet portal for people aged 65 and over. However, the scope of the project has changed and instead of this the council will, with £100,000 from the Modernising Government Fund, examine the use, and interest in using ICT, by over 65s as part of Aberdeenshire's strategy for older people, Live Life to the Full. The council has chosen the Marr area as a suitable pilot area for this project.The Executive is supporting internet developments for older people and the Scottish Executive's Older People's website: www.scotland.gov.uk/olderpeople, was established on 29 August 2002. The website was designed with input from older people and early trials show an average of 3,500 visits per month. Steps are now under way to further publicise and develop the site.

The cost of the study was £29,000.For the avoidance of any doubt, this study covered the Know the Score elements of the 2001 Safer Scotland campaign, which did not include national advertising funded by the Executive. This study is, therefore, unrelated to the national Know the Score advertising which was launched in March 2002, as part of our Drugs Communications Strategy.The very positive conclusions reached in the Lambda study were very welcome. Recent media reports linking the Lambda study with the 2002 Know the Score advertising, and alleging critical conclusions, are inaccurate and misleading. These reports are already the subject of formal complaints from the Executive and from Lambda Research and Consultancy.

The Scottish Executive Health Department held an event in October, to discuss how to improve implementation of the Framework for Mental Health Services in Scotland. At this, proposals to provide better support and training for primary care teams in the diagnosis and treatment of all mental health problems, including eating disorders, were considered.As a result, it has been proposed that mental health becomes a pilot group for workforce development. This pilot will involve working with key stakeholders at local, regional and national levels to determine the gap between the skills required and the existing skills set in the mental health workforce which will include those working for partner agencies.At present, general practitioners are expected to look after their own personal learning needs to better provide the health needs of their patients and to seek training accordingly. Guidance and assistance is available to GPs from NHS Education for Scotland via the Postgraduate Directors of General Practice Education.Additional training for community psychiatrists in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health problems, including eating disorders is currently delivered through Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programmes, which are organised and approved by the medical Royal Colleges. Guidance and assistance is available to hospital doctors from NHS Education for Scotland via the postgraduate deans and tutors.

The National Grid for Learning (Scotland) web services are funded by the Scottish Executive and managed by Learning and Teaching Scotland. The web services were launched in February 2000 and the cost in financial year 1999-2000 was £245,000. The budgeted running cost for 2002-03 is £850,000.

The number of hits on the site since its introduction in May 2002 is 199,970. However, given the opinion of the National Audit Office, in their report on government web sites, that hits is not a reliable way to measure activity, we monitor the site using figures relating to page impressions. Page impressions measure the number of actual pages a user views on the site. Since its introduction and to the end of October 2002, there have been 122,615 page impressions viewed on the M74 Completion website - monthly figures are shown in the following table. We had no projections of how many page impressions the site would attract as there were no precedents to benchmark against.Page Impressions 2002

May	21,025
June	11,826
July	12,632
August	15,523
September	25,776
October	35,833

The website is managed by Scottish Property Network (SPN) who regularly analyse site activity using the proprietary WEBTRENDS software.The total and monthly number of hits on the Scottish Executive public sector property website are shown in the following table. However, as National Audit Office (NAO) guidelines recommend that the number of page impressions or number of user sessions may be a more reliable indication of website traffic, these figures are also provided.

		May	June	July	Aug	Sep	Oct	Total
WebtrendsAnalysis	Hits to Entire Site (successful)	9,043	12,618	27,631	45,152	47,804	36,099	178,347
	Page Impressions	4,060	6,525	13,683	21,023	20,652	16,086	82,029
	Visits (User Sessions)	853	1,706	2,229	4,196	5,410	4,146	18,540

There were no pre-launch projections of numbers of hits. The success criterion for the site is an assessment at the end of the three-year pilot period through consulting the major public sector participants on how useful a marketing tool it is to them.

The Scottish Executive Education Department began receiving website statistics in February 2001. Since then the total number of recorded hits to the home page of the Children's Hearings website is 25,266 and to the entire site is 310,706.Statistics were not routinely collected on a monthly basis until November 2001. The following table gives details of monthly figures from then. No pre-launch projection of the number of hits was carried out prior to set-up of the site.

Month	Hits for Home Page	Successful Hits for Entire Site
November 2001	851	9,533
December 2001	640	6,581
January 2002	955	11,517
February 2002	876	10,280
March 2002	2012	24,001
April 2002	2963	35,173
May 2002	4230	49,063
June 2002	5201	60,349
July 2002	1056	12,169
August 2002	1720	23,584
September 2002	2,209	36,868
Total	22,713	279,118

The Funding For Learners website was launched in March 2002 and, at the end of September 2002, had received 29,122 hits. This figure compares favourably with our pre-launch projections.The total number of hits by month is:

March	7,637
April	11,920
May	1,802
June	2,640
July	1,779
August	1,338
September	2,006

The Do a Little, Change a Lot website: www.dochange.net, was redesigned and re-launched on 2 September to coincide with the new phase of the campaign. The site had 2,378 hits in its first month. No pre-launch projections were made. The previous version of the site had around 19,800 hits from September 2001 to August 2002.

The National Debate on Education website was launched on 20 March 2002. Since then, there have been approximately 21,000 hits to the homepages for the Discussion and Reflection stages of the Debate.Figures for the number of hits per month are displayed in the following table.The National Debate is a new approach to consultation and we had no comparable information on which to base a pre-launch projection of the number of hits.

Period	Number of Hits
20-03-2002 to 29-04-2002	4,246
30-04-2002 to 27-05-2002	3,860
28-05-2002 to 24-06-2002	3,865
25-06-2002 to 29-07-2002	1,472
30-07-2002 to 26-08-2002	445
27-08-2002 to 30-09-2002	692
01-10-2002 to 28-10-2002	6,626