Chamber and committees

Responsibility for the management of the police estate sits with the Scottish Police Authority and the Chief Constable.

Police Scotland has advised that while they have no plans to build any new police stations in 2023, a new police station will be opened in spring 2023 at Newton House in Ayr, which is owned by South Ayrshire Council. This will provide a new, modern replacement for the existing Ayr police station.

We use a range of measures to monitor the wellbeing of the workforce taking into account the diverse nature of the workforce operating in a range of roles and geographies, the broad spectrum of wellbeing needs at both a professional and personal level and different reporting arrangements across sectors. Our approach reflects a combination of the following measures; the annual iMatter survey, feedback from local and national staffside and other stakeholder channels, academic research, data collected by regulators and partners and evaluation of nationally-led initiatives. In addition, the Wellbeing Champions Network is now well-established to provide feedback on areas of priority need, and to share best practice across health, social care and social work organisations.

We are continuing to work with leaders across health, social care and social work, as well as hearing directly from staff, to understand where the current pressures are, and what further actions can be taken to mitigate their impact on staff. We are working on a range of local initiatives designed to meet the basic and practical needs of staff, and their teams. This includes access to quiet spaces to support health and wellbeing, and the installation of lockers.

The Scottish Government has established a Workforce Data Information and Intelligence Improvement Programme to support the ambition of the National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care in Scotland in achieving its vision of a ‘sustainable skilled workforce with attractive career choices and fair work where all are respected and valued for the work they do’.

This ring-fenced Programme of work focuses specifically on delivering actions which improve Health and Social Care workforce data, information and / or intelligence at national level which will contribute to better decision making, planning and strategy for the Health and Social Care Workforce in Scotland.

This work will be integrated, where appropriate with service delivery plans across the system, working towards a consistent approach to analysing the workforce and workforce data for future planning.

To ensure collaboration with stakeholders the programme is governed by the National Workforce Forum which has cross-sector representation from primary, secondary and social care. Two projects within the Programme are currently live, both governed and actioned by a cross-sector team of key stakeholders, including Project Teams and User Needs groups.

The first project is developing a process for annual workforce projections modelling. High level conclusions from initial projections modelling will be published in early 2023 and include details of assumptions and methodology used in development of the projections model.

This work will be further developed iteratively in response to emerging evidence and data and to capture the complexity of the health and social care workforce and its inter-dependency with financial and service planning.

The second project involves identifying key data links and gaps to address which will improve parity of data collection, design and data quality across the Health and Social Care workforce. User needs assessments of the current workforce data are currently underway across the Health and Care landscape.

The Programme’s medium and longer term plans will involve collaborating with service and financial planners to scope work to better integrate workforce data with service and financial delivery plans for health and social care.

An update on the National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care will be published later this year.

Our aims for Digital Skills & Leadership for all staff across Health & Care in Scotland are delivered by the cross-sector Building Digital Skills & Leadership Programme hosted by NHS Education for Scotland.

This Programme that has funding in place until June 2023 has been incorporated into Priority Four of the ‘Care in the Digital Age: delivery plan 2022 to 2023’ that was published on 8 November 2022. Details of this programme within the delivery plan can be found on the Scottish Government website at:

Care in the Digital Age: delivery plan 2022 to 2023 - Digital Skills & Leadership

We recognise that the opportunities offered by digital are continually evolving and we need to continually explore those opportunities to transform our services for patients and service users. Our further plans for Digital Skills & Leadership will be outlined as part of an update of the delivery plan by April 2023 taking account of the budget available for 23/24 and further opportunities to support and accelerate reform.

I refer the member to the Scottish Government’s publications webpage. You can find the framework here: Acute Oncology Service (AOS) in NHS Scotland: principles - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

This Government firmly believes that every child growing up in Scotland, regardless of their background or gender, should have an equal chance of attending university and participating in higher education.

To date we have made progress on work to support fair access to higher education. The number of students attending university from the most deprived areas in Scotland is at a record high and we have exceeded the Commission on Widening Access target to have 16% of students from the most deprived areas at university by 2021. We recently appointed a new Commissioner for Fair Access, Professor John McKendrick, to continue to progress this important agenda.

Scottish universities are covered by the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), which requires them to, amongst other things, report on mainstreaming the equality duty; publish equality outcomes and report progress; and assess and review policies and practices.

As part of its March 2020 Memorandum of Understanding with the EHRC, the Scottish Funding Council developed a National Equality Outcomes framework to address the most persistent inequalities in further and higher education (HE) that institutions are asked to consider and report on as part of the 2021-25 PSED reporting cycle.

Sex, as one of the nine protected characteristics under The Equality Act (2010), is considered as part of the National Equality Outcomes, with outcomes including sex imbalance on courses and mental health support for male students.

The Scottish Government is committed to the production of a Student Mental Health Plan to support all students in further and higher education throughout their learner journey.

The Student Mental Health Plan will sit within and link to the wider actions across Scottish Government, including our Suicide Prevention Strategy, ‘ Creating Hope Together ’ which was developed and published in collaboration with COSLA in September 2022, and our forthcoming Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy.

63% of respondents for whom health was a relevant concern told us that their ability to access health services was much better or a little better after receiving support from Connecting Scotland. 36% of respondents told us that their ability to access health services hadn’t changed and 1.4% said that access was worse or much worse.

If this result was reflected across the entire Connecting Scotland cohort of over 60000 people receiving devices, we could estimate that around 38,000 of those would have experienced some improvement in accessing healthcare services.

Overall this result indicates a positive impact of Connecting Scotland support on people’s ability to access the health services they need. It may be that respondents who felt there had been ‘no change’ in this respect already had a routine means of accessing the healthcare services non-digital channels (e.g. ordering repeat prescriptions over the phone). With more and more digitisation of healthcare service touchpoints being implemented in order to create efficiencies and save money it is likely that the numbers of people using their Connecting Scotland device and internet connection for this purpose will show an increase with time.

Here are some of the things that Connecting Scotland users have told us about how it has benefited them to use their device and internet connection to access health services:

“Allowing very important near me medical calls”

“Being able to access health services much easier, including managing appointments and medicines.”

“It has allowed us to do more things and stayed connected to appointments within the NHS, so I've been able to attend my hospital appointments via the tablet and it allows me to see things on a bigger screen than a small mobile phone (I have bad vision).”

(Aggregated survey data for phases 1 and 2 of Connecting Scotland. There were 1174 responses overall for whom access to health services was relevant.)

The Scottish Government wants to encourage more women into crofting, ensuring they are empowered to develop skills and access opportunities, creating equality of opportunity and prosperity, as well as supporting business innovation. That is why we are increasing the support provided to women in agriculture to £600,000 per year, during this Parliament, to deliver practical solutions to improve the lives of women living or working in Scottish agriculture.

The recent Economic Condition of Crofting Report states that the number of female crofters has more than doubled from 13% in 2014 to 30% in 2022 and since 2020, just under half of the new entrants recorded by the Crofting Commission were female.

That decision is still under review by the Risk Management Committee; however they are examining a range of other options to accommodate public and third sector bodies who do not currently use the energy frameworks.

As outlined to the member in parliamentary question S6W-13453 on 26 January 2023, the national framework for acute oncology services has been published. The framework lays out the agreed key principles that underpin an effective Acute Oncology Service (AOS) in NHS Scotland and outlines the clinical standards and proposed outcome measures against which services can be developed and monitored.

In addition, we have committed to increasing the acute oncology workforce as outlined in the National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care.

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