It should be noted that not all NHSScotland staff that reach the average retirement age will retire as there is no legal requirement for them to do so.

Under this Government, the number of Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) staff has increased by 423.4 WTE, or 11.1 per cent. This includes a 10.6 per cent increase in Paramedics. SAS will use increases in its funding to recruit an additional 300 ambulance staff over the next five years.

This information is not held centrally. Specific local information may be available from individual NHS health boards.

This information is provided by Information Services Division.

The following table shows the number of screening tests¹ in each NHS board for 2010-11 to 2013-14. Breast screening information for 2014-15 is due to be published in April 2016.

Source: Scottish Breast Screening Programme Information System – KC62 Returns.

Notes:

1. All appointment types including routine, early recall and self/GP referral appointments.

2. Women are invited to attend screening once every three years. Therefore, NHS board of residence areas are not necessarily screened evenly throughout the three year period.

3. The NHS island boards are screened once every three years using the mobile units.

This data is published by Health Protection Scotland and is available at: http://www.hps.scot.nhs.uk/documents/ewr/pdf2015/1535.pdf.

The Scottish Government captures unmet need in two main ways:

1) Unmet need in treatment

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that anyone contacting their GP surgery has guaranteed access to a GP, nurse or other healthcare professional within 48 hours.

The performance measure for this standard is measured by the Health and Care Experience Survey.

A further standard on advance booking measures the percentage of patients reporting that they could book more than two days in advance.

The performance measure for this standard is also measured by the Health and Care Experience Survey.

2) Unmet need at a population level

The entrenched differences in health outcomes across the Scottish population are well documented and the Scottish Health Survey supplements detailed morbidity and mortality data collected by NHS Scotland.

There are no plans to develop further recording systems for GP services.

The Scottish Government, working collaboratively with NHS National Services Scotland, is developing the Scottish Primary Care Information Resource (SPIRE). This will enable the extraction of data from GP practices where those practices agree to participate. SPIRE is being deployed across Scotland during 2016-17.

The project benefits are expected to encourage practices and patients to participate, thus enabling NHS organisations and approved researchers to use SPIRE in ways that can help everyone in Scotland. For example:

Supporting research into new treatments;

Planning services and care for patients with particular conditions;

Responding to major public health issues like a flu epidemic;

Improving the provision of health and care to vulnerable groups; and

Developing knowledge about the uptake of medicines.

The Practice Team Information (PTI) dataset of GP practices captured READ diagnostics codes for individual patients that provide an insight into multimorbidities. The PTI dataset was a survey of around 70 practices that ran until 2012-13.

The Scottish Government, working collaboratively with NHS National Services Scotland, is developing the Scottish Primary Care Information Resource (SPIRE) to replace PTI. This will enable the extraction of data from GP practices where those practices agree to participate. SPIRE is being deployed across Scotland during 2016-17.

SPIRE is able to extract all relevant available data from GP practices, including diagnostics and drugs codes and thus provide information on multimorbidity.