Chamber and committees

I have asked Teresa Medhurst, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), to respond. Her response is as follows:

Protecting the health, safety, and wellbeing of all people in Scotland’s prisons is at the heart of SPS’ newly published Policy for the Management of Transgender People in Custody (2023).

The SPS engaged with approximately 400 people during the review of the SPS Gender Identity and Gender Reassignment Policy (2014), and the SPS has no record of any communication from Professor Jo Phoenix during this period.

The Ukraine Longer-Term Resettlement Fund (ULTRF) has so far brought 1238 homes back into use spanning 19 projects with a total investment of over £25 million. Fife Council have not applied to the Fund and therefore no funding has been made available to them through this route.

All Scottish territorial Health Boards are committed to delivering the Universal Health Visiting Pathway (UHVP).

The collection of UHVP coverage data across the 11 pathway visits is managed at a Health Board level. However, Official Statistics on the coverage of 5 of those visits (first visit, 6-8 week visit and all 3 child health reviews) are published annually by Public Health Scotland (PHS) Child health pre-school review coverage 2021 to 2022 - Child health pre-school review coverage - Publications - Public Health Scotland .

Scottish Government policy officials also liaise regularly with Health Visiting leads through their national network and dedicated discussions with individual Boards.

The OBC indicates a total of 472 total beds. In addition to 92 assessment and observation beds the breakdown is as follows:

NHS Scotland currently offers a whole gene screening panel for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer to test for faults in both BRCA1 and BRCA2 and a range of other target genes. At present, this testing is available to people from specific population groups (including those of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage) if they meet clinical criteria that indicate a higher genetic risk of breast and ovarian cancer.

The Scottish Strategic Network for Genomic Medicine (SSNGM) was established in 2022 to develop a fully considered and sustainable genomic medicine service for Scotland. The SSNGM contains specialist Scottish Genomics Test Advisory Groups (SG-TAG) for both cancer and rare and inherited conditions, whose role is to review and assess the clinical validity and utility of new tests, and changes to the referral criteria for existing tests.

The SSNGM plan to initiate a review of the existing hereditary cancer testing pathways in 2024. This review will include both the referral criteria for our existing genomic test offering and alternative testing methods and will make recommendations via the SG-TAG process.

Scottish Government are in regular dialogue with NHS Boards and senior leaders on their community nursing services, including health visiting. Scottish Government policy officials are a member of the Health Visitor Leads Network which meets bi-monthly and includes representation from all of Scotland’s territorial Health Boards. The last meeting was held on 16 January 2024.

In addition, Scottish Government policy officials are undertaking bilateral meetings with all Health Boards, between November 2023 and March 2024, to discuss their health visiting services and the outcomes of the recent Evaluation of the Universal Health Visiting Pathway:

Universal Health Visiting Pathway evaluation - phase 1: main report - primary research with health visitors and parents and case note review - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) .

The Scottish Government continues to improve provision of maternity and neonatal services through implementation of The Best Start: A Five Year forward plan for Maternity and Neonatal care in Scotland.

We receive regular reporting from Health Boards stating they have accommodation provisions in place to support and meet the needs of the parents.

With the announcement of the new model of neonatal care the Scottish Government have commissioned RSM UK to provide detailed analysis of the capacity requirements associated with the new model.

The existing "Scottish Government Records Management Health and Social Care Code of Practice (Scotland) 2020 has short section on dealing with health records of those who identify as transgender. This links to guidance from the Medical and Dental Defence Union of Scotland, the General Medical Council and NHS National Services Scotland (NSS). It was recognised in 2020 that it was an area under development, and subsequently the Scottish Government's Chief Statistician issued guidance for public bodies on the collection of data on sex and gender (2021). The draft Records Management Code of Practice for Health and Social Care, due out in the spring of 2024 aims to incorporate the Chief Statistician's guidance along with feedback from stakeholders and provide further guidance to NHS Boards.

We recognise the scale and impact of heart disease across Scotland and have set out our strategic direction to address this in our 2021 Heart Disease Action Plan. This includes actions to ensure that people with suspected heart disease have timely and equitable access to diagnosis, treatment and care.

We are making progress in the delivery of these actions including the development of nationally agreed pathways and ensuring the effective use of data to drive improvements.

We expect Health Boards’ 2024-25 annual delivery plans (due March) to clearly set out how they will increase productivity and reduce waiting times across all inpatient, day-case, outpatient specialities.

The following table shows the number of homes approved from applications received from (a) registered social landlords (b) local authorities since the National Acquisition Programme was announced on 19 July 2023. This information is to 31 January 2024: