Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government’s role is to set the strategic policy direction for the NHS in Scotland. Operational matters, including staffing, are the responsibility of each NHS board and will depend on the service needs of the health board taking account of national, regional and local priorities.

It is the expectation that NHS boards plan and provide safe, effective and high-quality care, in line with their statutory service provision and workforce planning responsibilities considering current turnover, retention, absence rates and budgets.

We are investing a record £21.7 billion in our NHS in 2025-26, including £200 million to reduce waiting times. This investment will deliver additional MRI, CT, ultrasound and endoscopy procedures and supports the Respiratory Care Action Plan commitment to improve and simplify access to diagnostic tests.

Access to diagnostic tests remains a key priority for the Scottish Government, and we are working closely with Primary Care colleagues to expand spirometry capacity and strengthen diagnostic pathways for respiratory conditions. This includes exploring options to build workforce capacity and ensure patients can access the right tests at the right time.

Enhancing primary care is central to this approach. We recognise the vital role that GPs, community nurses, pharmacists, dentists and other members of the primary care team play as the foundation of healthcare in our communities. Our commitment to strengthening primary care is embedded in the Service Renewal Framework, which aims to shift more care into community settings and make services more accessible for patients.

The Scottish Government has also established a Scottish Expert Advisory Group to support the work of the UK National Screening Committee Lung Task Group and inform the implementation of a targeted lung cancer screening programme for Scotland. Introducing a new screening programme such as chest and lung CT scanning is inherently complex, and the required evidence and information must be fully developed before implementation begins. This is likely to take several years for each UK nation.

We will continue to work with NHS boards and national delivery partners to ensure diagnostic capacity and workforce planning remain central to improving respiratory care and meeting the needs of people across Scotland.

The Scottish Government fully supports the work of the Respiratory Specialty Delivery Group, based at the Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD), which is developing this pathway. While the Scottish Government is not directly involved in drafting, we understand it is progressing through CfSD’s internal assurance processes, and we will continue to work closely with colleagues leading this work to keep stakeholders informed.

The Scottish Government recognises the importance of ensuring people diagnosed with lung conditions, such as interstitial lung disease (ILD), receive timely, high-quality post-diagnosis support, and values the vital role that third sector organisations play in delivering these services across Scotland.

The Scottish Government’s Respiratory Care Action Plan (RCAP) sets out our priorities for improving prevention, diagnosis, treatment and support for people living with respiratory conditions, including interstitial lung disease (ILD). To oversee delivery of the RCAP, we established the Scottish Respiratory Advisory Committee (SRAC), which brings together clinical experts and third sector partners such as Asthma + Lung UK and Chest, Heart & Stroke Scotland. This collaborative approach ensures that the voices of patients and charities are central to shaping services

A key commitment in the RCAP is to increase access to pulmonary rehabilitation which is an is an important element of respiratory care. We are working in partnership with Chest, Heart & Stroke Scotland on developing a digital resource for pulmonary rehabilitation.

This will provide digital self-management tools, including advice, videos and information about conditions such as ILD, that can be accessed anywhere in Scotland, ensuring equitable access for people regardless of where they live. The materials will be hosted on the My Lungs My Life website: My Lungs My Life | Patient Respiratory Self-Management Toolkit: My Lungs My Life | Patient Respiratory Self-Management Toolkit.

We have also published the Respiratory conditions - quality prescribing strategy: improvement guide 2024 to 2027, which aims to keep people at the centre of their treatment and promote safe, evidence-based, sustainable prescribing.

The guide was developed by a wide range of stakeholders and is intended to support clinicians and people living with respiratory conditions, in shared decision-making and the effective use of medicines. It offers practical advice and options for tailoring care to the needs and preferences of individuals.

In 2023, we published the Tobacco and Vaping Framework, which set out the Scottish Government’s ambition to create a tobacco-free generation by 2034. Progress towards this goal is measured against five key indicators, two of which relate to smoking and vaping behaviours among children:

• Prevalence of current smoking in children
• Prevalence of current vaping in children

To address a gap in child data, the Scottish Government commissioned a boosted Scotland sample in the ASH SmokeFree GB Youth survey starting in 2024. This enables annual monitoring of statistics for adolescents (ages 11-17) in Scotland on tobacco, vaping and nicotine products use, behaviours and attitudes.

Data on children’s use of tobacco, vapes and nicotine pouches among children from the Scottish sample is published annually. Results for 2024 and 2025 are available on the Scottish Government website Introduction - Vaping and smoking among Scottish adolescents: ASH SmokeFree GB Youth survey 2024 results - gov.scot.

While the latest Action on Smoking and Health Smokefree GB Youth Survey shows that only a very small percentage (3%) of children in Scotland reported ever using nicotine pouches in 2024 and 2025, I am concerned about these products and their appeal to children and young people.

We know from existing evidence that other nicotine products, including cigarettes, can negatively impact an individual’s oral health and increase the risk of gum disease, however there is currently limited clinical evidence on the impact of nicotine pouches specifically. Scottish Government will continue to review the evidence and take any appropriate and necessary action required to support the oral health of children and young people.

In the meantime we continue to offer free regular NHS dental examinations to everyone in Scotland, to enable risk factors to be identified and recorded. NHS dental services also offer enhanced preventative treatment, including smoking cessation advice, for all patients including children and young people.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-42570 on 29 December 2025. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.

The 2018 Oral Health Improvement Plan set out the Scottish Government’s intention to introduce enhanced service practitioners, working within the General Dental Service (GDS) or primary care/ high street environment. The aim of this proposal was to support more treatment delivery in a primary care setting rather than requiring referral to hospital, and included a system of accreditation for GDS dentists covering support, mentoring, governance, quality assurance and training.

The Scottish Government introduced the role of enhanced services practitioners in June 2019 in the domiciliary care sector, as set out in the following amendment to the Statement of Dental Remuneration: PCA(D)(2019)09 - Dentists with enhanced skills in domiciliary care: NHS (General Dental Services) (Scotland) regulations 2010 - amendments; Amendment no 136 to the Statement of Dental Remuneration.

Since the introduction of enhanced services practitioners in the domiciliary care sector, Government priorities have necessarily focused on supporting the dental sector through the Covid-19 pandemic, pandemic recovery, and implementing dental payment reform in November 2023 – the most significant change to the dental payment system in a generation, and a critical enabler to wider service sustainability into the long-term.

In June 2025, the Scottish Government published the Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework which further affirms our commitment to shift care into the community and away from hospital settings. As part of strategic work around Framework implementation, we are considering how best to reduce referrals to hospital dental services including the potential roll-out of wider enhanced skills dentists in primary care.

The Scottish Government recognises both the importance of gaining a better understanding of Whole Time Equivalence (WTE) within the primary care dental workforce, and the potential limitations associated with existing headcount data. In response, a dental workforce survey was published on 31st October 2024 which provides an insight into the WTE distribution of primary care dentists across NHS Boards and can be found at the following link: Dental Workforce Survey 2024 | Turas Data Intelligence.

The Scottish Government is also currently working with NHS Education for Scotland as part of a Short Life Working Group on data. The focus of this work is to seek to create a more holistic data set for dental statistics, including regular measurement of the Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) of the dental workforce, to better support workforce planning processes and alleviate dental access pressures.

As previously stated in the answer to S6W-41852, the processing of a representation requires multiple members of staff of the Energy Consents Unit to undertake a combination of detailed administrative tasks. The time and cost taken to process representations vary depending on the nature, size and complexity of each submission, as well as the total number of representations received for an application.

It is therefore not possible to provide average processing timescales and costs that would accurately portray the work undertaken by Scottish Government officials to administer representations submitted by the public.

As previously stated in the answers to S6W-41171 and S6W-41175 on 27 October 2025, all submissions received by the ECU are treated in the same manner, irrespective of the application or the sender of the representation. All material considerations raised in representations are carefully considered before reaching a decision on the relevant application.

All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.