Chamber and committees

The National Elective Coordination Unit (NECU) does not directly remove patients from NHS health board waiting lists. As part of the agreed pathway to support national waiting list validation, and to ensure a patient’s appointment requirements are accurately recorded, NECU’s digitally supported waiting list validation methodology collates the information provided by patients, before returning it to the NHS Board of residence for update within patient administration systems.

To ensure any removals from waiting lists are appropriate, the NECU system records patient responses and their reason for removal. NECU follow-up directly with all patients who have not responded or have not left a comment explaining why they wish to be removed. Similarly, for patients who are unsure of the nature of their appointment, NECU follow-up with the patient directly. Where there is a clinical query from the patient, this is highlighted and the clinical team within the NHS Board of residence are asked to follow-up with the patient. To action a removal, Health Boards review both the patient response and the comment to ensure the reason for removal is appropriate.

Throughout the waiting list validation activity, patients remain on their respective waiting list until the NHS Board agrees it is appropriate to remove the patient.

NECU’s validation process is digitally supported, however, it is not a digital only process. Although all patients are contacted by text message and invited to access a patient portal to record their response, patients who may be unable to access the digital platform are followed-up by the NECU patient coordination team by telephone. If the patient is unable to be reached by both text message and telephone, a recommendation is returned to the NHS Board of residence to send a letter to the patient asking them to contact their Health Board directly. No amendment to the patient’s waiting list entry is actioned until confirmation is received from the patient.

NECU will publish its first annual update in October 2023.

Waiting List Validation is not new. Local Health Boards routinely validate patients on waiting lists to ensure patient requirements are correctly recorded. The establishment of a national approach is based on existing principles. By adopting these principles, a patient would not be removed from a waiting list without contact either by text or phone call, and if required, a clinical consultation.

After a consultation, it may be agreed no treatment is required at the time of referral. However, if the clinical team believe that a further referral for the same condition is likely in the future, or if it is felt that treatment will be required but the patient is not quite ready for this, or if the patient wishes to defer a decision on treatment, the patient will have the ability to make an appointment for the same condition at a future time.

We committed in our Integrated Health and Social Care Workforce Plan (December 2019) to create 225 more Advanced Musculo-Skeletal Practitioners in Primary Care.

This is to support the embedding of multi-disciplinary teams in primary care settings and enable people to be seen by a specialist physiotherapist at the very earliest opportunity.

A total of 37 students were recruited in 2021-22, and a further 52 were recruited in 2022-23. It is anticipated that 50 students will be recruited in each of the next 2 academic years, meaning we are on track for meeting this commitment by 2025-26.

The first cohort of students will graduate in September 2023 and a number will be located in NHS Ayrshire and Arran.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring everyone who is eligible to vote can do so and is working with partners to look at potential new ways to increase registration levels amongst under-represented groups including young people and foreign nationals.

The Scottish Government is considering responses to our recent consultation on electoral reform, including on how to improve registration levels, and I intend to meet with the Head of the Electoral Commission in Scotland to discuss the report and its recommendations in greater detail.

Tackling poverty and protecting people from harm is one of three critical and interdependent missions for the government – alongside our focus on the economy and strengthening public services. We recognise that families with a child under the age of one are more likely to live in poverty and, as set out in Best Start, Bright Futures, our second Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, are taking forward a range of action to help.

We have already significantly strengthened support through devolved social security. The Scottish Child Payment is worth £25 per eligible child per week with 316,000 children benefiting as of 30 June 2023. Programme for Government 2023-24 commits to further increasing the value of the Scottish Child Payment in line with inflation next year and to introducing regulations that remove income thresholds from Best Start Foods from February 2024, supporting an additional 20,000 people.

In addition we have delivered over a quarter of a million Baby Boxes to expectant parents – providing them with more than £400 worth of essential items for their newborn – and are committed to investing £500 million in Whole Family Wellbeing to improve holistic family support so that families get the right support, in the right way and at the right time.

Over 11,000 families have benefited from the Family Nurse Partnership since it began in 2010 and we have committed to further expansion over the next two years to reach more young mothers and fathers.

We have also implemented the Universal Health Visitor Pathway across Scotland, to ensure that all families get a minimum of 11 home visits – eight in the first year of life and three child health reviews up to age 5 – and we are supporting health visitors to have more meaningful conversations around financial inclusion through piloting dedicated training to increase their skills and confidence in discussing money worries and provide related guidance.

Between 2019 and 2023, we have invested £26 million in the development of perinatal and infant mental health services across Scotland.

Additionally, we have led work in Scotland to raise awareness of the unique nutritional needs of infants, and engaged a wide range of stakeholders to take action to develop Emergency pathways on Infant Food Insecurity, integrated into wider, locally directed and holistic income maximisation and food insecurity supports.

As set out in our Programme for Government, we will continue to invest in primary prevention from pre-birth through the earliest years and have set out ambitious plans to expand access to funded childcare for 13,000 more children and families by the end of this Parliament

It is estimated that 90,000 fewer children will live in relative and absolute poverty this year as a result of this Government’s policies, with poverty levels 9% points lower that they would have otherwise been. This includes lifting an estimated 50,000 children out of relative poverty through our Scottish Child Payment.

The Scottish Government will continue to do everything within the scope of our powers and budget in order to tackle and reduce child poverty, including for families with a child under the age of one.

The response to question S6W-21286, answered on 13 September 2023, notes that as a result of the devolved settlement and the Scottish Government’s powers, along with the interaction with reserved tax and benefits, it is not possible to deliver the Parental Transition Fund as originally envisaged.

As set out in the Medium-Term Financial Strategy, the current financial situation facing the Scottish Government is amongst the most challenging since devolution. Tough and decisive action must be taken to ensure the sustainability of public finance, whilst also strengthening the immediate support available for households impacted by the cost of living crisis. On this basis, the £5 million made available for the Parental Transition Fund in 2023-24 has been reallocated to help meet the previously announced increased investment in the Fuel Insecurity Fund to address the need for immediate help with fuel costs and to support the Scottish Government’s path to balance.

The Scottish Government hopes to publish a draft Bioenergy Policy Statement for consultation by the end of 2023.

The Programme for Government 2023-24 set out major new commitments on childcare including how we will test, for the first time, what an all-age childcare system will look like for Scotland in six councils.

We will work closely with those communities, our partners, and providers to consider how the early learning and school age childcare workforce can support these systems, and what they will need to do so. This will include consideration of regulatory issues, qualifications and professional development, which will take time to do fully and is why we will now set out our plans in 2024.

In the meantime, we will continue to work with the Framework Steering Group and other partners to support delivery of the actions being developed as part of the original plan. We have, for example, already developed a range of new learning resources, implemented a Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) fee waiver and are starting work on a new national portal for professional learning.

Summary Statistics for Schools in Scotland provides census data on numbers of registrations for funded early learning and childcare (ELC) at the local authority level as of September 2022. These figures are shown in the following table. The census does not currently record the number of hours being accessed by each child.

Between April 2009 and March 2023 a total of 14 schools were built in Aberdeen and 399 across Scotland. Prior to 2009 the school estate data made no distinction between newly built and substantially refurbished schools - between 2007 and 2009 one school in Aberdeen and 199 across Scotland were either built or substantially refurbished.

Through the Scottish Industrial Energy Transformation Fund (SIETF), to date, we have allocated over £22 million to co-invest with a diverse range of Scottish manufacturers to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions through increased energy efficiency and deep decarbonisation projects.