Chamber and committees

The date of the next Working Group on PCSD meeting has yet to be set. We are looking to arrange the next meeting of the Working Group in Autumn 2023.

The Scottish Government has worked collaboratively with partners, patients and third sector organisations in recent months to develop a ten year cancer strategy for Scotland.

Due to publish Spring 2023, the strategy will take a comprehensive approach to improving patient pathways, from prevention and diagnosis through to treatment and post-treatment care. It aims to improve cancer survival and provide excellent, equitably accessible, care across Scotland, including those affected by brain cancer.

A new earlier diagnosis vision will feature within the strategy and will include similar actions to those outlined in the Brain Tumour Charity’s report. This includes continuing to deliver our Detect Cancer Earlier Programme, working with primary care clinicians to ensure they have direct access to diagnostic tests and quality education sources; optimal cancer diagnostic pathways are designed and implemented across NHS Scotland; and public campaigns educate and empower those with possible symptoms to act early.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring fund accessibility as part of ongoing implementation. We met with Health Boards in summer 2022 to discuss the implementation of the fund and areas for improvement, including accessibility.

I am unable to commit to a date for delivering this journey time. The costs and benefits for delivering this need to be considered against those for delivering alternative rail enhancement projects, notably those that will contribute towards the decarbonisation of Scotland’s railway, within constrained funding.

In the meantime, as set out in our response on 16 March 2023, to PQ S6W-14784, Transport Scotland is, alongside industry partners, exploring options for lengthening passing loops on the Highland Main Line to enable longer and more frequent freight and passenger services.

Transport Scotland will consider these, and further infrastructure enhancements that would enable future journey time savings between Inverness and Edinburgh and Glasgow, within the constraints of available funding and subject to a robust business case.

The Scottish Government does not yet have complete YPFF data for the whole period of 2022-23. We expect Health Boards to have provided this data by the end of May 2023.

The Scottish Government is aware that there has been and are challenges in delivering complex surgery (such as ovarian) across all regions. Regional action plans have been developed to address the specific issues in those areas.

The NHS continue to prioritise emergency, urgent and cancer care, and where there is an urgent suspicion of cancer, they make every effort to ensure a patient is seen as quickly as possible, with the majority receiving appointments within the appropriate time frame.

Significant pressures may result in longer waiting times and efforts are being made to reduce waiting times and support patients to be seen as quickly as possible.

The Scottish Government is working with local government partners on the Additional Support for Learning Project Board to deliver the recommendations of the 2020 additional support for learning review by March 2026. All local authorities are considering the actions of the ASL Review, and will continue to consider the incorporation of actions within local improvement plans.

In addition, the Scottish Government is working with partners in ADES, COSLA and Education Scotland, to develop a national measurement framework which aims to support improved outcomes for children and young people with additional support needs.

This work will continue to be considered as part of the action plan and progress can be followed through the published minutes of the Project Board.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that every school aged child has access to a device by the end of this Parliament.

In 2020/21, we provided £25 million to local authorities across Scotland to tackle digital exclusion, resulting in over 72,000 devices and 14,000 internet connections being distributed to children and young people to support their learning.

Local authorities have also invested in devices from their own budgets. Information from them indicates that up to 280,000 devices have already been distributed to learners across Scotland (including the 72,000 funded by the Scottish Government).

In December 2022 the Scottish Government completed discovery work to establish the current picture of digital devices and infrastructure in schools. Using the findings from the discovery, we continue to work closely with local authorities and COSLA to deliver on the commitment.

Information on Social Care Eligibility and Waiting times is collected and published by the Scottish Government, and includes the waiting times between first contact with services and the completion of a community care assessment. The latest data are publicly available via the following link: Social Care Eligibility Criteria And Waiting Times, Scotland, 2020-21 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot).

Many Local Authorities have reported difficulty in providing the information asked for in this data collection, which has had a significant impact on the robustness of the information available for analysis. We are working with Public Health Scotland (PHS) to consider the future of this data and are developing plans to capture waiting times data within existing Social Care collections returned to PHS, aiming to make it more straightforward for partnerships to provide data, and in turn resulting in more complete and consistent data in the future.

For those able to provide data for 2020-21, around 58% of people aged 65 and over waited less than 2 weeks between first contact and completion of a community care assessment (based on 16 LAs) and 21% waited longer than 6 weeks. For people aged 18-64, just over half (53%) waited up to 4 weeks (based on 19 LAs) with 36% waiting more than 6 weeks. (See annex 3 of the tables which accompany the release).

There is one Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland (REHIS) accredited undergraduate course currently available in Scotland, provided by the University of West of Scotland. The University of West of Scotland are able to provide data over the past 9 years on the number of people who have graduated with this degree: