Chamber and committees

Work is underway to plan for implementation of the recommendations in The Best Start. We will take this planning work forward in partnership with boards, including the Scottish Ambulance Service to develop a comprehensive understanding of the resource implications of the recommendations.

The Scottish Ambulance Service, through funding from the Scottish Government and NHS boards, deliver the ScotSTAR (Scottish Specialist Transport and Retrieval) Service. The service undertakes all neonatal transfers providing a safe and dedicated transport service for a group who, because of their clinical condition, may require an augmented clinical team during transport.

It is for NHS boards to plan and deliver clinical services and ensure that they have the correct staff in place to meet the needs of their services and ensure high quality patient care. As part of this we expect them to have robust workforce plans and recruitment and retention policies in place which take account of health visitor vacancies and retirements.

In addition the Scottish Government has committed to delivering an additional 500 Health Visitors by 2018, and we have invested £3.3 million since 2014 to support additional training.

The work with NHS borders will be completed in May 2017. There will be a networking event in late May to further share the learning from this project and a final report will act as a resource for NHS boards to use in their VTE improvement work.

It is for NHS boards to plan and deliver clinical services and ensure that they have the correct staff in place to meet the needs of their services and ensure high quality patient care. As part of this, we expect NHS boards to have robust workforce plans and recruitment and retention policies in place which take account of midwifery vacancies and retirements.

We have increased student midwifery intakes for five years in a row including another 4.9% for 2017-18. We are also providing funding of £450k over 3 years to retrain former midwives and nurses through our national Return to Practice scheme. However, we recognise that challenges still remain and we will continue to work with the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and NHS Boards, including NHS Lothian, to ensure we have the right number and mix of midwifery trainees and staff.

To make sure our NHS has the right skills mix, we will introduce national and regional workforce planning. On 1 February 2017 we launched the National Health and Social Care Workforce Planning Discussion Document. We are inviting responses to this consultation by 28 March 2017. The Discussion Document will inform the National Health and Social Care Workforce Plan, which will be published in Spring 2017. The consultation is available at the following link:

https://consult.scotland.gov.uk/health-workforce/national-health-and-social-care-workforce-plan/

In addition, our innovative midwifery and workforce planning tools - a UK first - have helped to ensure that NHS Scotland continues to meet the RCM recommended midwife-to-birth ratio. Application of the tools is mandatory across NHS boards.

Day to day decisions on policing matters are a matter for Police Scotland, with the oversight of the Scottish Police Authority. Police Scotland continue to tackle housebreaking through the City’s dedicated housebreaking team and a range of tactics and measures to best serve Edinburgh’s communities. Police Scotland are also delivering local home security conferences and working with partners across the city to tackle the issue of break-ins and pursue offenders.

ISD Official Statistics for quarter end March 2017 will be published in June 2017.

At 31 January 2017 there were 1,149 care homes for adults operating.

Of these, 853 were care homes for older people and 296 were care homes for other adults, primarily adults with disabilities. Care homes provide a variety of services and support people who are funded in different ways.

We estimate that there are around 700 Intermediate Care beds across Scotland. These beds are commissioned by individual Integration Joint Boards to provide short-term rehabilitation and reablement in a more homely setting, following an acute episode of care, with the aim or returning the person back to their own home.

Many more care home places are commissioned by health and social care partnerships to support people with a range of needs.

The Scottish Government welcomes the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health's State of Child Health report which reaffirms the work currently underway across government to improve child health. The Scottish Government is carefully considering all of the recommendations in the report to identify any further work needed.

Many of the report's recommendations are already being taken forward in Scotland including: rolling out the Family Nurse Partnership to reach every eligible teenage mother in Scotland by the end of 2018; prioritisation and expansion of the health visiting service provided to families; bringing forward a Child Poverty Bill for Scotland; maintaining our commitment to support people in Scotland affected by the UK Government's welfare cuts; providing a Baby Box for all newborn babies; progress in achieving the UNICEF UK Baby Friendly best practice standards; placing relationships, sexual health and parenthood education at the centre of the school curriculum; achieving the target of halving exposure to second hand smoke through the Take it Right Outside campaign five years early; investing in a range of programmes to support and encourage healthy eating; investing in free school meals for all primary one to three children; investing in physical education in schools; exceeding our target of delivering 150 Community Sport Hubs across all local authorities; working on a new Mental Health Strategy which will focus on the earliest and most effective interventions to prevent children and young people from becoming ill; and committing to producing an overarching child health and wellbeing strategy to consolidate all of the actions.

Record keeping of an individual’s care is an important aspect of a nurse’s role and contributes to ensuring quality of care. As part of their role nurses and midwives must keep clear and accurate records relevant to their practice. This requirement is set out in the revised Nursing and Midwifery Council’s Code, which came in to effect from 31 March 2015, and further details of the requirements can be found at - https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/nmc-publications/nmc-code.pdf

In addition as part of our Excellence in Care work programme, led by our Chief Nursing Officer, we will be including work on record keeping.

Any prescribing or referral for psychological therapies treatment is a clinical decision for a patient’s doctor in discussion with the patient and in terms of anti-depressants there is good evidence that GPs assess and treat depression appropriately. All GPs prescribing is monitored and discussed individually through annual appraisal. Audit of prescribing in mental health commonly occurs involving Health Board pharmacy departments. There is National annual reporting of prescribing patterns and trends which are carefully considered by Government and other agencies.

Data is published by Information Services Division on the number of people referred to psychological therapies and starting treatment each quarter, Psychological Therapies Waiting Times In NHSScotland, as well as on the level of prescribing for mental health published on an annual basis, Medicines used in Mental Health, which includes the level of prescribing for anti-depressants. These reports are available online at http://www.isdscotland.org/Publications/. The Scottish Government has also published “Key Information on the use of Antidepressants in Scotland” which can be found online at: http://www.gov.scot/Resource/0045/00456540.pdf.