Chamber and committees

Residents should only be admitted to a care home after a full risk assessment. Thereafter, the Health and Social Care Standards set out what everyone who uses services should expect, including being safe from harm.

Scottish Government has invested £25m to support digital inclusion for school-aged learners across Scotland. At end-December 2020, almost 59,000 devices and over 10,000 connectivity packages had been distributed to learners and more will have been distributed since then. In total the programme is expected to benefit 70,000 disadvantaged children and young people across Scotland.

A further £45m is being provided to councils to support families with remote learning. This additional funding may be used flexibly by councils to purchase additional digital devices, to recruit additional staff and to provide additional family support.

Glow, which provides access to Microsoft Office 365, Google G-Suite for Education and Wordpress Blogs, is freely available to all learners and teachers in Scotland.

In addition, Education Scotland has provided a significant expansion of online learning through the National e-Learning Offer. 600 recorded lessons and 14,000 items of online learning and teaching resources are available to schools. Education Scotland have also published clear principles and entitlements for remote learning and will be monitoring provision on a weekly basis.

With regard to online services, the Glow platform is freely available to all learners and teachers in Scotland who have access to an internet connection and a device with a modern browser. During the period in 2020 when schools were closed (Mar-Jun 2020) over 560,000 users logged in to Glow over 40 million times. The first week of remote learning which started on 11 January saw over 464,000 unique users logging in over 5.1 million times. It should be noted that a small number of local authorities do not make use of Glow as their primary online learning environment and have chosen to use other platforms, therefore learners in these area do not show up in these numbers.

Education Scotland will be monitoring the provision of remote learning on a weekly basis. The first national overview report will be available on 22 January.

We do not hold this information centrally. Local authorities and schools are best placed to identify learners who do not have access to online learning. We have worked, and will continue to work, with Local Authorities to address these issues.

The Scottish Government have taken exceptional measures in every area of government to deal with the challenges of COVID-19 and that is particularly clear in the support for local government.

In addition to the £382.2 million of direct funding already committed, Scotland’s councils have been granted additional financial flexibilities to address the pressures caused by COVID-19 which could be worth around £600 million over the next two years.

Working with COSLA and local authorities the Scottish Government have now finalised a lost income scheme, including support for ALEOs, worth an estimated
‎ £90 million which when added to the recently committed £49 million consequentials will provide an extra £139 million of funding. Taken together these measures bring the value of the overall COVID-19 support package for councils to more than
‎ £1 billion.

The pre COVID-19 2020-21 Local Government Finance settlement had already provided an increase in day to day spending for vital local services of £589.4 million.

Developments like the necessary re-introduction of restrictions will inevitably have an impact on the mental wellbeing of people across Scotland.

We’ve invested £6 million of dedicated funding to support the whole population at this time. The Clear Your Head website contains a variety of resources and tips to help people take care of their mental health and wellbeing. For those who need more support, we expanded the NHS24 Mental Health Hub so that it is now available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We have also increased the capacity of the Breathing Space telephone helpline and web support service and created extra capacity for Computerised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CCBT). We have also rolled out the Distress Brief Intervention (DBI) programme on a national basis (via its new NHS24 pathway).

On 8 October 2020, we published Scotland’s Mental Health Transition and Recovery Plan. The plan is comprehensive, containing over a hundred actions, and is designed to support mental health needs across Scotland as we move through the phases of this pandemic. It also outlines a tailored programme of work which will help individual NHS Boards respond effectively to the anticipated increase in demand in the months ahead.

People who have had a positive PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) COVID-19 test are not required to take another test within a period of 90 days from their initial illness onset or test (if asymptomatic) provided they have completed their self-isolation period and are clear of symptoms. This is because is because fragments of inactive virus can be persistently detected by PCR tests in respiratory tract samples following infection – long after a person has completed their isolation period and is no longer infectious. This advice is based on Health Protection Scotland guidance

https://www.hps.scot.nhs.uk/web-resources-container/covid-19-information-and-guidance-for-care-home-settings/

Further information on the reasons for this approach can be accessed from Public Health England guidance: COVID-19: management of staff and exposed patients or residents in health and social care settings:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-management-of-exposed-healthcare-workers-and-patients-in-hospital-settings/covid-19-management-of-exposed-healthcare-workers-and-patients-in-hospital-settings#staff-who-are-pcr-positive-for-sars-cov-2 .

Management information on deaths of residents of care homes is collected by the Care Inspectorate and published in aggregate form on the Scottish Government website. It is available here:

Coronavirus (COVID-19): adult care homes - additional data - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

In addition, there are other sources of statistics about deaths, and deaths related to coronavirus in Scotland. National Records of Scotland (NRS) publish official statistics on deaths in Scotland, including deaths that occur in care homes, and deaths related to coronavirus. These statistics are sourced directly from death certificates, and will be the most accurate record of deaths. These statistics can be found on the NRS website here:

https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/covid19stats

Our decision-making process has been informed by the four harms approach throughout. The four key harms are: the direct impact of COVID-19 on health; the wider impact that the virus is having on health and social care services; how the restrictions are impacting on our broader way of living and society (including the negative effects on wellbeing and inequality); and effect of the restrictions on our economy. This approach is used to ensure that the transmission risk is taken into account but also that the impacts on the other harms are kept to a minimum.

We published a paper on 11 December that describes how the four harms approach works in practice and presents evidence to illustrate how we used this approach to make decisions about levels, activities and restrictions through the Route Map process. Our intention, in making this available, is to bring transparency to the very difficult decisions that we have had to make during this crisis.

The risk assessments of the direct impact of COVID-19 on health will have been specific to the decisions that needed to be taken. These will have been be informed by: the vulnerability of those using the setting; the nature of the setting and the extent to which it operates in circumstances in which this virus is most likely to spread; the number of people potentially affected; the duration of the activity; the proximity of the people involved; and the extent to which risk mitigation measures could be put in place. All of these factors are underpinned by the developing scientific evidence base, international experience and experience in Scotland. A recent publication from the British Medical Journal provides a good summary of setting risk.

While it is clinically impossible to assess the exact risk for each scenario, every decision we take is with the over-riding objective of trying to keep the country as safe as possible to get it through what we hope is now the final stage of the pandemic, with as few lives lost and as little harm to health, and to the economy, as possible.

This specific information requested is not held centrally.