Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government, along with public sector bodies across the UK, face a very challenging environment as we manage our finances through the current financial year and set our budget for 2025-26. We are continuing to fund the charity, Health in Mind, in 2024-25, to deliver a specialist peer service to those affected by historic forced adoption. We also fund the charity Birthlink to manage the Adoption Contact Register for Scotland which helps facilitate connections between individuals and families affected by adoption. Decisions on funding other related historical forced adoption activities have not yet been made.

The Scottish Government expects that health and care professionals will support patients with cancer to help them understand their condition and explain the options open to them, including around self-monitoring their condition where appropriate.

The Scottish Government is committed to working with third sector support services for cancer. We are currently in partnership with Macmillan to improve the service we offer patients with cancer through the Transforming Cancer Care Programme. This joint partnership with Macmillan is worth £27 million and is the first of its kind in the UK. The programme ensures that every patient with cancer in Scotland has access to specialist key support worker, who can provide emotional, financial, and practical support to those who need it most.

We have also piloted 12 Single Point of Contact (SPoC) sites, which allow an individual to work through their individual needs and design a care pathway that works best for them. Learning from this programme is demonstrating the role of SPoC in improving communication and optimising collaborative working across health, care and third sectors. We are considering how best to scale up this approach to the benefit of all patients, including those with blood cancer.

Through NHS Research Scotland (NRS), the Scottish Government provides funding for infrastructure to support the delivery of both investigator-led and commercially-sponsored clinical trials in the NHS here.

The NRS infrastructure includes the NRS Cancer Network whose role is to support the recruitment of cancer patients into clinical research studies. Cancer | NHS Research Scotland | NHS Research Scotland.

In Financial Year 2023-24 the NRS Cancer Network supported a total of 56 Blood Cancer clinical studies across Scotland.

The Scottish Government co-funds in partnership with Cancer Research UK the Adult Experimental Cancer Medicine Centres (ECMC's) in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and a Paediatric ECMC in Glasgow. These form part of a UK-wide ECMC Network that works to support the delivery of commercial and non-commercial early phase cancer studies, covering both solid tumours and haematological malignancies:

Edinburgh | ECMC (ecmcnetwork.org.uk)

Glasgow | ECMC (ecmcnetwork.org.uk)

The Glasgow ECMC has supported early phase studies developed through Blood Cancer UK's Trial Acceleration Programme (TAP).

We are committed to tackling health inequalities and providing access to the highest quality of care for all, which is why our ambitious cancer strategy has a focus on reducing inequities in access to all cancer care, and cancer outcomes.

We continue to support improving timely access to cancer services. We committed in our Programme for Government to opening a further Rapid Cancer Diagnostic Service (RCDS) in 2024/25, bringing our national total to six.

A clinical refresh of the Scottish Referral Guidelines for Suspected Cancer is also underway via the Centre for Sustainable Delivery to help ensure the right person is on the right pathway at the right time. This is further supported by a new primary care cancer education platform Gateway C, which was launched on 30th April in NHS Scotland.

To date 17 homes have been approved through the demand-led Rural Affordable Homes for Key Workers Fund. This includes 7 homes in Highland, 7 homes in Orkney, 2 homes in Moray and 1 home in North Ayrshire. More Homes Division officials are in discussion with local authority partners on a number of other potential projects.

We are continuing to engage with all local authorities through Scotland Housing Network’s Local Housing Strategy Forum to encourage proposals to be forward where there are identified local requirements.

This data is not centrally available; whilst Public Health Scotland publish the total number of patients waiting for specialist mental health services, detail of the individual types of assessment or diagnosis is not held. The publications for both CAMHS and Psychological Therapies waiting times for each quarter can be found at Publications - Public Health Scotland.

The Scottish Government is committed to implementing the National Neurodevelopmental Specification: Principles and Standards of Care for Children and Young People, published in September 2021, which specifies service standards that all children’s services should follow, to ensure access to support is effective and consistent across Scotland.

The Scottish Government have also established the National Autism Implementation Team, in partnership with Queen Margaret University, to support Health and Social Care Partnerships to consider best practice and support improvement through the redesign of autism diagnostic services.

The National Implementation Team is supporting NHS Boards to examine diagnostic pathways for autism and establish regional experts to assist with improving tiered autism specialisms across health boards.

The Scottish Government does not collect this data.

The Scottish Government is committed to implementing the National Neurodevelopmental Specification: Principles and Standards of Care for Children and Young People, published in September 2021, which specifies service standards that all children’s services should follow, to ensure access to support is effective and consistent across Scotland.

The Scottish Government have also established the National Autism Implementation Team, in partnership with Queen Margaret University, to support Health and Social Care Partnerships to consider best practice and support improvement through the redesign of autism diagnostic services.

The National Implementation Team is supporting NHS Boards to examine diagnostic pathways for autism and establish regional experts to assist with improving tiered autism specialisms across health boards.

The Scottish Government has spent approximately £6.4 million on the necessary design and assessment work for the A720 Sheriffhall Roundabout scheme since Transport Scotland appointed its technical advisor, AECOM, in July 2013.

This figure is inclusive of VAT where applicable and covers costs associated with design and assessment work. This includes costs associated with options assessment, engineering design and preparation work, environmental assessment (including environmental survey work), traffic and economic assessment, stakeholder engagement, statutory process including public local inquiry, and supervision of ground investigation works.

Neither Scottish Government or Public Health Scotland (PHS) centrally hold all of the information requested.

Table 1 presents the latest available statistics on the total number of admissions for patients aged less than 16 years who had waited over a year for planned treatment as an inpatient or day case covered by the Treatment Time Guarantee (TTG) from 2013 onwards. The data below are presented at NHSScotland level for all specialties, broken down by calendar year. Please note that this does not cover services that are exempt from the TTG, including obstetrics services, and organ, tissue or cell transplantation whether from a living or deceased donor. Spinal treatment by injection or surgical intervention was excluded from TTG until 1 April 2014 and designated national specialist services for surgical intervention of spinal scoliosis was excluded until 1 October 2014. These have been included in the TTG reporting from these dates.

Table 1 – Total number of admissions as an inpatient or day case for patients aged less than 16 years who had waited over a year (52 weeks), NHSScotland and all specialty level, by calendar year, from 2013 onwards

This information is not held centrally by either Scottish Government or Public Health Scotland (PHS).

PHS does not capture waiting list information on all NHS services and where they are captured, many are sourced from aggregate returns submitted to PHS by NHS boards. It is therefore not possible to identify the number of individuals that ‘have been on an NHS waiting list’. In addition, the aggregate data supplied by NHS boards does not provide patient-level information and as such, age breakdown is not available.