Chamber and committees

Funding for the provision of smoking cessation services is allocated to NHS health boards. Individual boards are then responsible for design and delivery of high quality services, in line with current evidence and guidance, in order to deliver the agreed targets and outcomes.

Individual treatment plans for all patients, including cancer patients should be formulated to take into account current specific guidance and recommendations in order to ensure greater access to cessation support in acute settings. Training on smoking cessation for frontline workers in the secondary care setting has been developed and is promoted in current guidance.

This approach has recently been set out in the Chief Executive Letter 1 (2012) on the Health Promoting Health Service¹ which was issued on 16 January 2012. This includes a specific action for NHS boards to ensure dedicated specialist smoking cessation support is available within the hospital/acute setting which is integrated with community-based cessation services.

A number of boards run pre-operative assessment clinics during which patients are encouraged to quit smoking prior to any operation. The benefits of stopping smoking are explained and how the NHS can help smokers quit. If patients choose to quit they are referred immediately to specialist NHS smoking cessation services.

Note: CEL 1 (2012) Heath Promoting Health Service: Action in Hospital Settings http://www.sehd.scot.nhs.uk/mels/CEL2012_01.pdf.

Funding levels for smoking cessation from the tobacco control budget have remained the same for each of the last three years. Funds have been issued to boards as follows, including this current year:

Note: In addition to the funding outlined above, some £2 million per annum for smoking cessation is contained within NHS board baseline allocations.

Finally, in addition to NHS boards, community pharmacies also deliver a smoking cessation service. Community pharmacies are remunerated for this service, which is controlled during the year within the global sum set by the Scottish Government.

Specialist smoking cessation practitioners are key contributors to meeting the HEAT target on smoking cessation. They provide the front line “stop smoking” services to clients who wish to quit and also feed in data on quitters to the Information Services Division (ISD) Scotland monitoring system.

The certificate for work readiness is currently being piloted by Skills Development Scotland across five areas in Scotland (North Lanarkshire, Borders, Highlands, Fife and Glasgow). Taking the learning from these pilots, Skills Development Scotland plan to move towards full roll-out from January 2013.

As part of the all Government, all Scotland approach to tackling youth employment, all Cabinet Secretaries will consider how best they can each support Scottish Government objectives of helping young people into employment within their areas of responsibility on an ongoing basis.

The Nigg Skills Academy has been developed to provide access to training which will equip individuals with the skills to participate in the opportunities that will flow from current and future investment in Nigg and in the wider energy industry.

In 2012-13 the Nigg Skills Academy has been contracted to deliver 270 modern apprenticeship starts. 140 of the contracted places are for 16 to 24-year-olds.

Through our reform of post-16 education we will ensure that the whole system is focussed on improving the life chances of learners and on meeting the needs of employers and Scotland’s economy. Through the delivery of modern apprenticeships, work experience opportunities and student placements in both public and private sectors, we will offer young people the opportunity to learn a variety of important work-focussed skills.

More specifically, we will work with sector bodies such as the Digital Participation Action Group to support the development of work-focussed digital skills among our young people.

The £18 million available in 2012-13 now fully committed, and I am currently consulting on the best use of the remainder of the £30 million available over 2013-15, taking account of the impacts of this year’s investment.

I continue to take every available opportunity to widen the discussion beyond this additional funding and to consider how our investment across learning, economic development and local government can be aligned with the youth employment agenda.

In December 2011, the Scottish Government announced it would support 1,000 of the most disadvantaged young people including; care leavers, ex-young offenders and young carers, to enter the labour market over the next three years.

An Employer Recruitment Incentive of £1,500 is available this year to support employers who have employed a disadvantaged young person. The incentive will be subject to continuous evaluation and improvement measures throughout the three years that this incentive is available.

Making Training Work Better allowed us to develop proposals that seek to reduce duplication of funding for episodes of training whilst focussing on the provision of skills development for young people and maximising support for the low paid low skilled and the unemployed across Scotland. The proposals are:

- Develop higher level Technical and Professional Apprenticeships to offer a wider range of entry and progression opportunities through the apprenticeship programme;

- Provide flexible support, including incentives to employers, to support 16 to 24-year-olds from disadvantaged groups such as care leavers and young carers into jobs, including Modern Apprenticeships;

- Support 20 to 24-year-old Modern Apprentices across all frameworks rather than for selected sectors;

- Develop a transparent process for developing new apprenticeship frameworks that focus on employer needs through Scotland’s Modern Apprenticeship Group;

- Enhance the work experience element of the Get Ready for Work programme;

- Explore the potential for an outcome-focused national employability fund that brings together funding from a range of sources to provide more coherent and flexible pre-employment support for young people and adults;

- Protect provision and access to pre-employment skills provision for adults by ensuring that all the funding used to train and support individuals is dispersed in most appropriate way;

- Maximise support for those moving towards and into work by better targeting Individual Learning Account funding, and

- Continue to provide support for small and micro employers with 100 employees or less through Flexible Training Opportunities.