Chamber and committees

The NHS Scotland National Access Policy provides that whilst the vast majority of patients are seen within their local area, services may also be delivered through another Health Board or suitable alternative provider.

We have commissioned NHS National Services Scotland to establish a National Strategic Network for long COVID. This brings together representatives from Health Boards across NHS Scotland to provide a forum for the exchange of learning and best practice in delivering support and services for people with long COVID.

Our Emerging Energy Technologies Fund supports the development of CCUS and negative-emissions technologies and has been offered to support the Scottish Cluster Carbon Capture Project accelerate its effort to help Scotland’s just transition to net zero. We remain committed to supporting this development.

Due to UK Government still not confirming the award of the Acorn Project and also which emitter sites will form the Scottish Cluster, it has not yet been possible to deploy this funding support. Only when we, the Acorn Project and the Scottish Cluster are provided with a final decision will it be possible to assess how we can utilise this funding to best support the deployment of CCUS.

Tackling health inequalities and improving population health remain clear, ongoing aims of the Scottish Government. Through the Place and Wellbeing Programme we are supporting local action to tackle health inequalities by: supporting health boards to operate as effective anchor institutions; supporting community and voluntary organisations; and ensuring they and public sector partners have the support and resources to take positive action locally.

Working alongside Public Health Scotland, the Scottish Government Anchors workstream within the Place and Wellbeing Programme is supporting NHS boards to act as effective anchor institutions and build greater prosperity in our local communities. All NHS Boards have now submitted Anchors Strategic Plans setting out how they are planning to maximise their footprint as employer, procurer and owner of land and assets, to channel greater wealth into local communities, which in turn will help contribute to reducing health inequalities.

Community and voluntary organisations play a key role is supporting the health and wellbeing of local communities. We are working with them to provide fairer funding processes and increase access to resources that can support them to work locally alongside the public sector to help reduce inequalities.

The Fuel Insecurity Fund was first established in the winter of 2020, as part of the wider Winter Support Fund, to help households struggling with their energy costs who were at risk of severely rationing, or self-disconnecting entirely because they could not afford their energy costs.

The Scottish Government has distributed a total of £63.595 million to third sector partners to deliver the Fuel Insecurity Fund up until March 2024. The following table gives an overview of the budget and distribution since inception:

The Network and Information System Regulations set out standards which NHS Scotland Health Boards must comply with. Boards must test themselves against these standards which cover managing security risk, defending systems against cyber-attack, detecting cyber security events, and minimising the impact of cyber security incidents. This is in addition to mandatory information security and data protection risk/impact assessments and routine penetration testing on all major IT systems.

The NHS Scotland Cyber Centre of Excellence (CCoE), works nationally across health boards to prioritise the security capabilities of existing technologies and deployment of new tooling. This allows real time discovery of vulnerabilities and potential issues across a national view.

The Scottish Government and partners have been supporting pilot phases of the Scottish Childminding Partnership recruitment model, led by the Scottish Childminding Association, to recruit and train new professional childminders across rural, island and urban communities.

The first phase operated in 10 rural local authorities, including: Argyll and Bute; Dumfries and Galloway; Highland; Moray; North Ayrshire (Arran and Cumbrae); Orkney; Scottish Borders; Shetland; Stirling and Cne Siar.

The second phase tested the model in urban areas, including: Edinburgh; Glasgow; Dundee and East Renfrewshire. However, a number of rural areas continued to participate, including: Dumfries and Galloway; Highlands (Sutherland, Caithness and Isle of Skye); areas within Cne Siar; Orkney; and Arran in North Ayrshire.

As announced in the 2023 Programme for Government, the Scottish Government is committed to scaling up these innovative pilots to grow the childminding workforce by 1,000. We are currently working with the Scottish Childminding Association to develop a new national programme of recruitment and retention activity which will be offered to all Local Authorities.

Mortality data up to 2022, including breakdowns of deaths caused by cancer, has been published to its usual annual timetable by National Records of Scotland at https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/vital-events-ref-tables/2022/vital-events-22-ref-tabs-6.xlsx . This includes crude (unadjusted) death rates.

Public Health Scotland will publish further statistics on cancer mortality, including age-adjusted mortality rates and time series comparisons, in late 2024. This work has been delayed whilst the population figures for previous years are rebased by National Records of Scotland.

Applications which make their way through the application journey on the energyconsent.scot portal are assigned a single case number which is retained from the pre-application period, all the way through to a determination decision.

The dates at which a scoping opinion request submitted under section 12 of the Electricity Works (Environmental Impact Assessment) (Scotland) Regulations 2017 is received, and then a response provided, are not data points which are captured by the portal system. It is therefore not possible to calculate the average time taken to provide a response in the years requested.

Unauthorised access to information by the cyber threat actor was contained to information on the NHS Dumfries and Galloway network.

As part of the preparation of the SBA (Single Building Assessment process) Scottish Government has had conversations with the wider sector, including Fire Engineers and Assessors where we have discussed the need for a FRAEW (Fire Risk Appraisal of External Wall).

When assessing an existing building’s EWS (External wall system), it is noted that existing buildings cannot be expected to meet modern Building Regulation standards for risk to human life as these buildings were built during a time when less onerous Building Regulations were in force. The PAS 9980 will be used by assessors to make an informed expert decision of whether or not the EWS is a low, medium or high risk and dictate from this whether or not the current build up is tolerable, and no further remediation is required, or the risk is intolerable and therefore remediation should be undertaken.

The aim of a SBA is not to bring a building into compliance with current Building Regulations, but to ensure that the risk to building occupants is reduced to a tolerable level. The focus of the remediation is to follow the recommendations in the SBA in how to bring the relevant parts of the building to either a low, or tolerable risk level. Where large areas of the façade are being remediated, alterations will be required to comply with current (fire) building regulations including the use of acceptable materials. To note that the current ban applies to any new building warrant applications only.