Chamber and committees

Questions and answers

Parliamentary questions can be asked by any MSP to the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. The questions provide a means for MSPs to get factual and statistical information.

Written questions must be answered within 10 working days (20 working days during recess)
Other questions such as Topical, Portfolio, General and First Minister's Question Times are taken in the Chamber

Urgent Questions aren't included in the Question and Answers search. There is a SPICe fact sheet listing Urgent and emergency questions.

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Question reference: S5W-29453

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 28 May 2020
Current Status: Answered by Joe FitzPatrick on 10 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government for what reason it has not stated a timescale for reopening chronic pain clinics, in light of the Faculty of Pain Medicine of the Royal College of Anaesthetists recommending on 15 May 2020 the aim of “reverting to pre-COVID-19 capacity in the next six weeks”.

We have published the ‘Re-mobilise, Recover, Re-design, The Framework for NHS Scotland’ that sets out how Health Boards will follow national and local clinical advice to safely and incrementally prioritise the resumption of services paused during the current public health emergency. This is in the context of maintaining COVID-19 capacity and resilience, where many of the specialist pain workforce was re-deployed to, and providing appropriate support for social care.

As part of this, the Interim Chief Medical Officer and National Clinical Director have provided an outline of services that could be prioritised including:

cancer services, especially referrals and postponed treatments
expanding treatments for non-cancer urgent inpatients and outpatients
outpatient therapies where delay will increase the risk to patients, such as management of macular degeneration, paediatrics and respiratory services
mental health support
treatment room services such as blood monitoring and B12 injections

The above is in line with the Faculty of Pain Medicine guidance of 15 May, which refers to a letter issued by NHS England advising the initial focus should be on urgent and time critical work.

Our approach is driven by clinical priorities, as well as what matters to people’s quality of life. We are therefore engaging with Health Boards and stakeholders to stimulate a national discussion to inform local and regional planning to resume hospital pain management services as quickly and as safely as possible, and to evolve the Scottish Chronic Pain Service Model to improve access to care and support for pain management in the community.

Question reference: S5W-29402

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 27 May 2020
Current Status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 10 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government what advice it has provided on DNR (do not resuscitate) forms put in place for individual patients during the COVID-19 outbreak.

On the 10 April, the Chief Medical Officer, Chair of the Scottish General Practitioners Committee of the BMA and Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) wrote to GPs to provide advice and support on having anticipatory care planning conversations and to make clear that there is no requirement for health professionals to have a DNACPR discussion as part of this conversation, unless the patient wishes to discuss it or clinician feels strongly it is necessary to raise in conversation for the patient’s wellbeing. On the 17 April, a further joint letter from the Scottish Government’s Chief Medical Officer, BMA and RCGP was sent to GPs to reinforce the advice already provided.

Question reference: S5W-28773

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 29 April 2020
Current Status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 10 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reported concerns regarding the accuracy of some of the COVID-19 testing kits that it has procured from overseas, and how it ensures that all such kits fully comply with safety standards.

The type of tests being used in Scotland (real time PCR assays) ar e widely used for the detection of respiratory viruses, as well as a range of other viral pathogens, owing to their speed and versatility.

Scottish laboratories are working in collaboration with the Scottish Microbiology & Virology Network (SMVN), National Laboratories Programme (NLP) and Health Protection Scotland, as well as linking in with Public Health England, to ensure that all tests are quality checked and validated for use.

Based on work by NHS Lothian on symptomatic cases the accuracy of tests for clinical diagnosis is 98%. This was presented in a Royal College of Pathologists webinar - available online .

Question reference: S5W-28302

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 09 April 2020
Current Status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 10 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government how many of the 1,000 ventilators that have been ordered in response to the COVID-19 outbreak have been delivered.

Question reference: S5T-02243

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Monday, 08 June 2020
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 9 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government for what reason it did not immediately publish details of the number of patients who have contracted COVID-19 in hospital.

Question reference: S5W-29459

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 27 May 2020
Current Status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 8 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government whether the NHS Louisa Jordan will be used as part of the phased reopening of NHS services and, if so, on what date it will be made operational for such services.

The NHS Louisa Jordan will provide extra capacity as part of NHS Scotland’s response to COVID-19. It will initially create capacity for 300 extra hospital beds, with the ability to expand to over 1,000, if required. Although NHS Louisa Jordan will have ICU provision, our intention is to continue to provide critical care within the existing NHS Scotland estate, where possible. All health boards have been undertaking extensive work across Scotland to maximise the capacity available to manage expected rise in demand due to COVID-19 and this includes supporting patients who have conditions that are not related to COVID-19. This work is expected to provide sufficient treatment capacity to meet the rise in demand at this point. The NHS Louisa Jordan will remain an important part of our COVID-19 response and provides reassurance that we have measures in place to help treat people during this crisis. We are considering how the NHS Louisa Jordan bests contributes to that response in the future.

Question reference: S5W-28573

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Tuesday, 21 April 2020
Current Status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 8 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government how many respirators have been available to staff in each NHS board.

Assuming the member means FFP3 respirators, the following table shows the number of FFP3 respirators issued to each NHS Board from 1 January 2020 to 17 May 2020:

NHS Board	Number
Ayrshire & Arran	184,097
Borders	85,842
Dumfries & Galloway	96,826
Fife	152,531
Forth Valley	134,509
Golden Jubilee National Hospital	64,768
Grampian	310,289
Greater Glasgow & Clyde	586,778
Highland	147,227
Lanarkshire	266,279
Lothian	310,993
Orkney	34,934
Scottish Ambulance Service	142,256
Shetland	30,860
NSS (Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service)	14,950
State Hospital	13,354
Tayside	211,973
Western Isles	38,073

Question reference: S5W-28414

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 15 April 2020
Current Status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 8 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government how many enquiries from care home staff have been received by the email address that it has set up for people to contact if they consider that they do have sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE) to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, and how many of these have been resolved.

Question reference: S5W-28411

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 15 April 2020
Current Status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 8 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government how many items of personal protective equipment (PPE) are currently reserved specifically for care homes by the NHS National Distribution Centre, and how this compares with the figure when the COVID-19 outbreak began.

In both the private and public sectors the supply of PPE for social care is primarily the responsibility of social care providers themselves, including care homes. However, we recognise the immense pressure that global supply chains have been put under as a result of the pandemic, and therefore we established routes in March to support the sector with supplies from the national stock. These routes are the NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) Social Care PPE Triage helpline and deliveries of PPE to local Hubs in Health and Social Care Partnership areas for onward distribution or collection by social care providers.

We have not reserved a specific number of PPE items for care homes from the national stock; instead Hubs are being continually replenished on the basis of actual demand and consumption to ensure their stock levels are adequate to meet care homes’ and other social care providers’ needs, beyond providers’ own supply routes. Needs will vary across the sector and between different care homes, and this approach ensures that PPE levels through the national routes respond adequately to those needs. We are delivering between 4 and 5 million items of PPE per week from the national stock into the social care sector. Approximately 50% of these items are being consumed by care homes.

Prior to this pandemic we routinely held a pandemic stockpile of PPE, of which 25% was dedicated to the social care sector.

Question reference: S5W-29131

Asked by: Miles Briggs, MSP for Lothian, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Tuesday, 19 May 2020
Current Status: Answered by Jeane Freeman on 8 June 2020

To ask the Scottish Government how many care homes have had their registration cancelled by the Care Inspectorate in each year since 2007 due to a failure to achieve standards, and how many such failures have been recorded since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Inspection Year	Total
2016-17	1
2017-18	2
2018-19	4
2019/20	1