Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government allocates funding to NHS Boards based on the NRAC formula. The NRAC formula takes into account factors in addition to population levels, including relative deprivation and need for healthcare of different NHS Board areas.

The Scottish Government has invested significantly in supporting NHS Boards that are behind NRAC parity, and has committed an additional £1.5 billion over an eight year period to bring all NHS Boards within 0.8% of their target funding shares.

NHS Boards are expected to make best use of all available resources, financial and otherwise, to meet all agreed performance standards. In addition to the provision of this funding, there is a range of ways in which the Scottish Government offers support to Boards to meet these standards, including through the Waiting Times Improvement Plan and programmes such as the Unscheduled Care Six Essential Actions and the Scottish Access Collaborative, to ensure resources are being used as effectively as possible.

NHS Forth Valley’s budget has increased by £41.8 million (8.6%) since 2016-17, taking the Board’s overall funding level to £527 million.

The Scottish Government allocates funding to NHS Boards based on the NRAC formula. The NRAC formula takes into account factors in addition to population levels, including relative deprivation and need for healthcare of different NHS Board areas. Since 2016-17, the Scottish Government has allocated £7 million to NHS Forth Valley specifically to bring the Board towards its target funding share. This year all NHS Boards are within 0.8% of their target funding shares.

NHS Boards are expected to make best use of all available resources, financial and otherwise, to meet all agreed performance standards. In addition to the provision of funding, there is a range of ways in which the Scottish Government offers support to Boards to meet these standards, including improvement programmes such as the Waiting Times Improvement Plan, Unscheduled Care Six Essential Actions and the Scottish Access Collaborative, to ensure resources are being used as effectively as possible.

We regret all unnecessary premature deaths.

We expect NHS Boards to provide high quality, person-centred care for all people, including those with a suspected or confirmed cancer diagnosis. Our National Cancer Quality Steering Group has developed Quality Performance Indicators relating to the diagnosis and treatment of specific tumour types, including mesothelioma. These clinical indicators help identify areas of good practice and variance across Scotland and are regularly reviewed in order to drive quality improvement in cancer care.

We support GPs in detecting cancer early through our refreshed Scottish Referral Guidelines for Suspected Cancer - including updates for lung - which were published in January 2019.

Asbestos-related cancers normally arise as a consequence of exposure to asbestos many decades previously.

Regulation of workplace health and safety is reserved to the UK Government and enforcement of regulations is the responsibility of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE). The HSE has undertaken sustained activity to promote safe working practices in relation to handling asbestos and continues to do so.

As at 29 May 2019, ISD published figures showed that 83.9% of patients were seen and treated from initial referral to start of treatment within 18 weeks during March 2019.

As part of the Waiting Times Improvement Plan, Health Boards are expected to meet the standard of 95% of outpatients waiting less than 12 weeks and 100% of inpatients/daycases waiting less than 12 weeks by March 2021. The plan highlights clear trajectories towards this 2021 position.

The information can be found at the following:
https://www.gov.scot/publications/waiting-times-improvement-plan/

We are making available more than £100 million to health boards in 2019-20 to increase performance, for example, by recruiting staffing, additional evening and weekend clinics and theatre sessions to ensure progress is being made. This funding is part of the £850 million which underpins the Waiting Times Improvement Plan.

During 2018-19 NHS Forth Valley’s Chronic pain services experienced increasing pressure due to vacancies within the anaesthetic department, which has caused waiting times to increase.

Through the Waiting Times Improvement Plan NHS Forth Valley received around
‎ £4 million of additional funding in 2018/19 to support the reduction of waiting times across all specialities including pain management. We have made available a further £5 million for this financial year. This additional funding will support the recruitment of additional staff to improve patient access to services.

Nationally, we are developing an action plan to increase support and improve Chronic Pain service development across NHS Scotland. Officials are working closely with NHS Forth Valley to ensure that robust plans are in place to reduce the number of patients waiting to be seen for chronic pain treatment.

The Scottish Government is working closely with local authorities to ensure that arrangements are in place to deliver the commitment to expanding Early Learning and Childcare from August 2020, including the recruitment of additional staff.

Local Authorities are currently revising their forecasts of how many additional local authority staff are required, and this information will be published in the autumn. The Scottish Government remains confident that all local authorities will deliver the commitment from August next year.

Quality is at the heart of the expansion in funded early learning and childcare entitlement. Funding Follows the Child, which will be introduced in August 2020, will be underpinned by a National Standard that all settings delivering the funded entitlement will have to meet. Central to the National Standard is a clear and consistent set of quality criteria, recognising that the ELC expansion is fundamentally about improving the early years’ experience of our youngest children.

Funding Follows the Child is provider neutral and will empower parents to choose from a range of high quality ELC providers across the private, public and third sectors, including childminders.

A key aspect of Funding Follows the Child is ensuring financially sustainable provision across the ELC sector. To support this the landmark multi-year funding package agreed by the Scottish Government and COSLA will enable the payment of sustainable rates to funded providers delivering the funded entitlement – including funding to enable payment of at least the real Living Wage to all childcare workers delivering the funded entitlement.

Local authorities are already utilising additional funding for the expansion to 1140 hours to increase their hourly funding rates to providers in order to support them in the transition period to August 2020. For example, in June 2019 we published details of changes in the hourly rates that local authorities pay to funded providers over the period 2017-18 to 2019-20 (bib number 60909). This highlighted that the average hourly rate for delivering 600 hours for 3 and 4 year olds increased by 26% between 2017-18 and 2019-20.

The Scottish Government is committed to increasing the uptake of the two year old offer nationally by enhancing the offer of funded early learning and childcare (ELC) provided to two year olds as part of delivery of the expanded entitlement.

We are working with the UK Government and UK Parliament to secure a legal gateway and data sharing agreement that will provide local authorities in Scotland access to accurate information on their eligible population. A similar data-sharing legal gateway is already in place for English local authorities and the Department for Education links the introduction of data-sharing with a significant increase in uptake.

We are improving the information available to parents and carers to increase awareness and help them to make informed decisions about ELC, in particular through our new ELC pages on Parent Club. The language and messages have been informed by focus groups and message testing with parents of eligible 2 year olds, and focus on the benefits of ELC for the child. Our future marketing strategy is also being designed with the parents of eligible 2 year olds as the key audience. This will include leaflets, posters and targeted social media.

We are continually looking for opportunities to promote the offer through other services such as Health Visiting Pathway and Financial Health Check. We are also working internally across Government to make best use of new systems and capabilities, such as Best Start Grant, to identify opportunities for shared communication where we can deliver key messages about ELC and particularly the 2 year old provision.

The Children and Young People Improvement Collaborative is also supporting 9 multi-agency Local Authority teams who are looking at how to increase awareness and uptake of the 2 year old entitlement in their areas, using improvement methodology. Their findings will be shared with all Local Authorities later this year.

This year the Scottish Government has increased NHS Forth Valley’s budget by 3%, taking the Board’s overall budget to £527 million. As part of this uplift NHS Forth Valley received additional funding of £2.2 million to ensure that the Board, along with all other NHS Boards, is within 0.8% of its target NRAC funding share. The NRAC formula takes into account wider factors in addition to population, such as the requirements for healthcare across different age groups, additional needs, and the costs of supplying health services in remote and rural areas.

The performance of NHS Forth Valley against all eight key national targets can be found at
https://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Waiting-Times/ .

Recent improvements in NHS Forth Valley's performance include Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), where performance compared against the CAMHS standard improved significantly from just under 50% (quarter ending March 2018) to over 90% (quarter ending March 2019). Over the last four years, NHS Forth Valley has received over £2 million of mental health funding from the Scottish Government to specifically address capacity building, workforce and improvement. This investment is helping to contribute to the improved performance and a 33% increase in CAMHS staff since March 2016.

In 2018-19 NHS Forth Valley also met the 31-day standard for cancer (95%) and performed well above the alcohol and drug- three week referral to treatment standard (98.4%).