Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is taking a number of measures to ensure Scottish domiciled students from all sectors of society can access medical courses. By 2021 overall medical undergraduate numbers will have increased by 190 places (or 22%) over 2016 levels. This includes, since 2016, 50 ring-fenced widening access places focused on SIMD 20 applicants. For the 2019-20 intake, we have set a new target for Scottish domiciled and the rest of EU medical students in line with Scottish Government guidance to increase retention of medical students, replacing 100 rest of UK medical students with 100 Scottish domiciled/EU students on a phased basis over the next three years. We have also increased the number of students on our targeted pre-medical entry courses from 40 to 50, focused on socially disadvantaged as well as remote & rural applicants, and continue to fund our Scottish Graduate Entry (ScotGEM) programme which includes a return of service bursary.

The Scottish Government is already taking substantive steps to support families from before birth through the critical early years of a child’s life.

We published our Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan – Year One Progress Report on 26 June which sets out actions we have taken over the past year to tackle child poverty. In this report we set out the support Scottish Government provides to children and families through the course of their lives.

This includes: the Universal Health Visiting Pathway; Best Start Grant payments, Best Start Food payments from August 2019; and the doubling of Early Learning and Childcare to 1140 hours.

Moreover the recently announced Scottish Child Payment will provide further support of £10 per week, per child with no limit on the number of children families can receive support for. The benefit will be fully rolled out by 2022, with early-rollout available in 2021 for children under six. The benefit will mean that a family with two children will be more than £1000 better off each year.

All of these actions are taken as part of a wider, direct, investment of roughly £527 million specifically targeted at low income families with children, which does not include the universal investment which supports all families with children in Scotland.

The Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan is backed by the £50 million Tackling Child Poverty Fund, as announced in Programme for Government 2017-18. Current investment is set out within the first annual progress report published in June 2019.

The Fund is supporting innovative projects to tackle and reduce levels of child poverty in Scotland so minority ethnic households will benefit from all of the programmes supported from the Fund.

In addition, we have outlined that the Fund will invest £500,000 (2020-22) to work directly with Gypsy/Traveller families and other partners on our community education programme.

The current Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) census is collected annually from centres delivering funded ELC in September. It was designed to capture the number of funded registrations with ELC providers, along with some additional breakdowns such as stage and additional support needs. The methodology makes it difficult to capture more detailed information at an aggregate level, such as ethnicity, without encountering quality issues and placing a significant burden of collection on providers.

It has been recognised for some time that the current ELC census is not sufficient to provide the information necessary to manage this growing sector, and so since 2015 we have been carrying out a development project to transform the ELC census to an individual level child census. The new census process will be based on extractions of data from management information systems, and will collect more information on the characteristics of children registered for funded ELC, including ethnicity. Data from the new census will be available in 2021.

I refer the member to Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) Bib number: 60845

The following table provides a breakdown of 2019-20 NHS Board allocations to support the implementation of the Standards for Tier 2 and 3 Weight Management Services for Children and Young People, which were published by NHS Health Scotland on Tuesday 2 July: http://www.healthscotland.scot/publications/standards-for-the-delivery-of-tier-2-and-tier-3-weight-management-services-in-scotland . This is in addition to funding provided to NHS Boards through the Outcomes Framework for adult and child healthy weight.

The number of people who have died from sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) is not held centrally. However, the total number of deaths, registered in Scotland, for which epilepsy was the underlying cause are published each year in table 6.04 of the Vital Events Reference Tables, which are available via https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/statistics-and-data/statistics/statistics-by-theme/vital-events/general-publications/vital-events-reference-tables

Table 1. Number of deaths where the cause of death was registered as 'epilepsy,' under the 'Episodic and paroxysmal disorders' category, 2015-2018

Childhood immunisation rates across Scotland remain very high. Apart from rotavirus vaccine, over 95% of children had received each routine immunisation by the time they were 12 months of age.

This reflects both the hard work and commitment of our colleagues in the NHS and a recognition among parents of the benefits of vaccination. However, we are not complacent and will continue to make every effort to promote and encourage childhood vaccinations.

We recognise the impact vaccine hesitancy can have on global health and therefore the importance of ensuring every effort is made to promote and encourage uptake of vaccinations. Vaccine uptake rates in Scotland remain high, however, we are not complacent about this.

Health Scotland is part of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) global Vaccine Safety Network. Public facing communications, including a WHO accredited website, support our vaccination programmes and aim to encourage uptake by providing people with reliable vaccine safety information that educates and reassures.

As part of the work to modernise Primary Care, GPs will move away from delivering some routine services, including vaccinations, to focus on complex care, undifferentiated presentation and local clinical leadership. The change in focus of the GP provides the opportunity to explore alternative or more flexible approaches to delivering vaccinations through other areas of the NHS.

The Vaccination Transformation Programme (VTP) has been established to consider and implement new approaches to vaccination delivery. This programme empowers Health Boards to identify and apply local solutions to vaccine delivery that best suit them, their patients, and their geography. Health Boards are exploring a range of models which may involve establishing immunisation teams, centralised clinics, local GP delivery, or combinations thereof. This more localised approach to delivery will facilitate easier access to vaccination appointments.