Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is committed to improving the mental health and wellbeing of Scotland’s population and to ensuring everyone receives the best possible care and support from our health and care services. Delivering this can only be achieved with the right workforce capacity and capability. This is why we have committed to developing a long-term Mental Health Workforce Plan in the first half of this Parliament.

While each NHS Board rightly has individual responsibility for staffing and recruitment, we recognise the scale of the challenge and seek to provide support at a national level as appropriate. Under this Government, CAMHS staffing has almost doubled (+572.9 WTE) and we are taking several steps to grow the mental health workforce further.

NHS Education for Scotland CAMHS Workforce data, published 6 December 2022, showed there were 124 Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) CAMHS workforce staff in post In NHS Lanarkshire as at September 2022 compared to 96 WTE as at September 2021, an increase of 29% [1] This CAMHS workforce data includes Neurodevelopmental staffing.

We are working with all NHS Boards to support them to implement the National Neurodevelopmental Specification: Principles and Standards of Care , including working with NHS Lanarkshire through regular Board engagement meetings to discuss ongoing challenges and pressures. This engagement captures ongoing developments around workforce capacity with the most recent update confirming that NHS Lanarkshire have successfully recruited for this area, with only a few posts still to be filled. This activity will continue into early 2023.

[1] Dashboards | Turas Data Intelligence (nhs.scot)

Scottish Water is currently progressing over £23 million of investment in the Highlands and Islands to improve wastewater treatment, enable growth and to maintain its wastewater assets throughout the area. This is primarily to upgrade and improve existing assets as previous investment periods were focused on building new treatment works in many areas across this region to ensure a high standard of treatment and improve environmental water quality.

Scottish Water continues to work with developers that require new sewerage infrastructure in order to extend the public sewer network, with Scottish Water making a financial contribution to a reasonable contribution level established in regulatory guidance.

The information requested is not held centrally. Information on the number of pupils with additional support needs, planning approaches and types of need are collected and published within national statistics. This is available from Schools in Scotland 2022: summary statistics - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

Thank you for your question. Emergency service workers who have been killed in the line of duty can be nominated by the emergency services through the First Minister’s Brave@Heart bravery awards which includes the St. Andrew’s Award. Brave@Heart and St Andrew’s Awards recipients are selected by an independent panel.

Section 53 of the Education (Scotland) Act 1980 provides that local authorities must provide, or secure the provision of, a school lunch free of charge to pupils who meet the eligibility criteria set out within that Act. The national eligibility criteria for free school meals is available through the following web link: School meals - mygov.scot.

In addition to this, free school lunches are available to all children in primaries 1 to 5 and in special schools. This applies to all schools either run by a local authority or which are directly funded through a Scottish Government grant. This policy is not set out in legislation and is delivered through a joint agreement between the Scottish Government and local authorities.

Local authorities also have the flexibility to make discretionary offers of free school meals to children and young people from families who do not meet the national eligibility criteria where they are experiencing financial hardship due to exceptional circumstances. There is nothing within legislation to say when such discretionary offers should be made, since we believe that local authorities should be given the maximum flexibility to consider each approach based upon its own individual circumstances.

The Scottish Government remains absolutely committed to incorporating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into Scots law, as far as possible within devolved competence.

Our intention is to bring the Bill back to Parliament for Reconsideration Stage. Preparations for that are well underway and include engagement with the UK Government to try assess whether they are broadly content that the amendments bring with the Bill within legislative competence and to reduce the risk of another referral to the Supreme Court.

We will lodge the motion to reconsider the Bill and publish the amendments to the Bill as soon as possible but cannot yet confirm a timetable.

The Scottish Government does not hold this data. However, some 126,339 properties are connected to Scottish Water’s sewer network in the North region (which includes Highlands and the Western Isles). In 2021, the National Records of Scotland reported the total number of households in the Highlands and Islands as:

• Highland Council – 110,743
• Na h-Eileanan Siar – 12,925
• Orkney Islands – 10,758
• Shetland Islands – 10,554

Therefore approximately 13% of domestic properties may have private sewerage arrangements in the Highlands and Islands. Overall, the Scottish Government estimates that 8% of households across Scotland have private sewerage arrangements.

Addressing the wellbeing needs of the Health and Social Care workforce is now even more crucial than it was prior to Covid-19 and is key to both retaining our GP workforce at the current record level of 5209 and as we press ahead with our commitment to increase the GP population in Scotland by at least 800 additional GPs by end 2027.

We are investing in a number of measures that are accessible to GPs to support the physical, mental and emotional needs of the workforce, including:

• the National Wellbeing Hub and National Wellbeing Helpline;
• investment of £2 million in targeted support to the primary care and social care workforces;
• the Workforce Specialist Service, which is a confidential multidisciplinary mental health service with expertise in treating regulated health and social services professionals;
• Specific GP Coaching for GPs thinking of leaving the profession;
• additional funding to NHS Education for Scotland (NES) for the provision of psychological interventions and therapies to the Health and Social Care workforce;
• guidance to promote effective wellbeing conversations;
• enhancing occupational health provision;
• improving access to quality assured peer support and reflective practice; and since autumn 2021 we have been developing a new National Wellbeing Programme, with workstreams covering specific areas of work including ICU, nursing, primary care and social care.

We are also working with the Scottish General Practitioners Committee of the BMA with the aim of making Practice Learning Time formally available from 2023/24. While practices can set aside learning time on their own initiative, we are considering how this can be supported at a national level.

A total of 254 Target Enhanced Recruitment Scheme (TERS) bursaries have been taken up by GP trainees in the South Scotland parliamentary region since 2018. A full breakdown is included in the following table.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-13195 on 21 December 2022. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers