Chamber and committees

TEC Funding - Total £70.3 Mil

22-23 - £7.3 Mil

21-22 - £15 Mil

20-21 - £ 9 Mil

19-20 - £7 Mil

18-19 - £7 Mil

17-18 - £7.5 Mil

16-17 - £7.5 Mil

15-16 - £10 Mil

The Scottish Government has not made any assessment of the technologies in question in relation to renewable energy trading. As the regulation of energy markets remains reserved, this would be a matter for the UK Government to consider.

All 17 Scottish Government owned buildings, although not fully accessible, have recently (late 2022 to mid-2023) undergone a round of accessibility audits that have graded each as a B (satisfactory, minor works required). These audits will feed into the Scottish Government Asset Planning work which follows on from our Estate Strategy. The Plan will prioritise where investment will be targeted and subsequently where the recommendations of minor works can be taken forward to further improve accessibility where required.

The Security of Network and Information Systems Regulations audit lifecycle continues to assess health boards on a yearly basis against the Public Sector Cyber Resilience framework

Working with the NHS Scotland Cyber Centre of Excellence, the Scottish Health Competent Authority are continuing to support boards in addressing any findings and gaps in their application of the NIS Regulations to mitigate the cyber threat.

This includes improvements around centralised security, monitoring, threat hunting, incident response and training & awareness. We are therefore better enabled in the achievement of security compliance across NHS Scotland, protecting people’s data and improving the resilience of critical services for patient care.

The Scottish Government has seen a substantive reduction in new outpatient, as well as inpatient and day case waits over two years since the targets were announced last year.

As of 31 March 2023, for outpatient appointments, 33 out of 41 specialties (80%) have fewer than 10 waits over 2 years, while 20 specialties have none. We also continue to see a reduction in waits over 18 months for new outpatients, which have reduced by 48.5% at 31 March 2023 compared to June 2022 (from 8,804 to 4,534). 41% of specialties also now have fewer than 10 patients waiting over 52 weeks. The number of patients waiting longer than 2 years for inpatient or day case treatment was reduced by 27% since targets were announced (from 9,572 to 6,985). 18 of 30 specialties have fewer than 10 patients waiting more than two years, and 13 specialties having no-one waiting more than 2 years.

The M365 Cross-Organisation Collaboration Programme has been established to maximise collaboration and communication opportunities available to organisations across Health and Social Care. The ability of organisations to safely and easily share information through the M365 platform will provide multiple benefits to citizens and ease pressures on our service delivery systems.

Working in partnership with the Local Government Digital Office, work is underway with staff in participating Local Authorities & Health Boards and further planning is in progress to enable wider data sharing.

We have implemented the ability to share the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) electronic patient record (ePR) with General Practice. All Health Boards (with the exception of NHS Shetland) now have this in place.

Ongoing monitoring of implementation and engagement with NHS Shetland is underway to identify actions required to progress. This work is now being incorporated into the Urgent and Unscheduled Care collaborative programme.

Please see answer to question SW-18813 on 20 June 2023 for how we support innovation through demand led challenges.

We established the Digital Mental Health Programme in 2020 to respond to the increased demand for mental health services by integrating and maximising use of digital, increasing existing service capacity and resilience within each health board.

We continue to work with Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre (DHI) to host the digital mental health innovation cluster and identify opportunities for reinforcing a robust mental health infrastructure. Since its launch in March 2022 the cluster has recruited 950 members from across clinical, academic and industrial stakeholders and promotes innovation through the development of collaboration facilitated through a number of clusters events the latest focused on three key areas: prevention, greater access to services and support for mental health services staff.

The Inventory Management System (IMS) was successfully rolled out to all Health Boards at the end of March 2023. Further work is underway with the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service and Scottish Ambulance Service to identify potential areas of benefit for local IMS stores. In addition to this, Data and Analytics workshops have been held with 8 Boards to demonstrate further improvements at a local level as a result of the IMS implementation.

The Right Decision Service is now in the process of being transitioned from an innovation development, run by our partners in the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre, to a national service run by the NHS. This will see the establishment of this national decision support service by the end of summer 2023.