Chamber and committees

The Chief Pharmaceutical Officer is putting together a workforce forum to look at the workforce challenges and bringing together stakeholders from pharmacy education and pharmacy service provision to set a strategic workforce plan for the profession.

The Scottish Government will also continue to work with our key partners to ensure that the balance is maintained across the whole pharmacy workforce in the hospital, community, and GP practice sectors.

The Scottish Government workforce integrated plans commits to increasing the pharmacy pre-registration training places by 120 over the next 4 years and we are currently increasing training places available for pharmacy technician training, which will bring more staff in to the profession.

Regulation of the pharmacy profession is applied on a UK basis. However, people arriving in Scotland with pharmacy qualifications from other countries are able to contact NES Pharmacy to explore additional training needs to enable them to practice in Scotland. NES would be able to assist with training gaps, or help to put forward a case to the GPhC.

The Schools of Pharmacy in Scotland have no plans to reintroduce the OSPAP scheme for overseas students.

Since 2015 the Save a Life for Scotland (SALFS) partnership has equipped over 640,000 people in Scotland with the skills to perform CPR. The refreshed strategy seeks to increase this to 1 million people by 2026. This will be achieved through continued partnership working to raise awareness, and the delivery of CPR training across Scotland.

Spirometry is already a key recommendation in national clinical guidelines and we expect clinicians to deliver care in line with all relevant clinical guidelines when assessing patients who present themselves at healthcare settings with respiratory symptoms.

We also recognise that data plays an important role in improving services and understanding respiratory care in Scotland. That is why in our Respiratory Care Action Plan we have committed to develop a core respiratory data set that will help us understand the areas for improvement in respiratory care.

This procedure is usually performed in an outpatient setting. Public Health Scotland can confirm that the SMR00 dataset contains outpatient clinic records where spirometry is listed as the main operation.

Data on nationality is not collected as part of the COVID vaccination programme.

We commenced the collection of ethnicity data as part of the vaccination programme in November 2021. This is to help tackle racialised health inequalities. Once this data becomes available it will help us to better design and tailor services to improve people’s health outcomes. This data is collected following a recommendation from the Expert Reference Group on COVID and Ethnicity (ERG).

The ethnicity question is a mandatory field, and so everyone should complete this field, though there is an option for people to select the option ‘prefer not to say/don’t know’. The ethnicity question used is taken from Census 2022 Question 23.

Full information on what personal information we process , including ethnicity, and how we use your data as part of the COVID-19 vaccination programme can be found on NHS Inform under Data, Privacy and Ethics.

Public Health Scotland already publishes information about equality of vaccination uptake. The most recent data can be found at COVID-19 Statistical Report - 1 December 2021 - COVID-19 statistical report - Publications - Public Health Scotland . The report contains information about the data sources used.

A number of measures are in place to ensure child witnesses are protected within our justice system. For example, the court can take extra steps, called 'special measures', to help children and young people under 18 give the best evidence they can. Children who are witnesses in criminal courts are automatically entitled to special measures including a screen in the courtroom; a TV link to somewhere outside the courtroom; and a supporter who can sit with the witness while they give evidence. Other measures are available on application to the court. Further information on the support available to witnesses can be found at Help and support - mygov.scot . All criminal justice cases with child witnesses are referred to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service Victim Information and Advice (VIA) service. VIA can provide information about the criminal justice system and key developments in the case affecting the witness, discuss any additional support that the witness may require to give evidence and help them make contact with appropriate support organisations.

In addition, from January 2020 Regulations have been in place to ensure that any child witness under the age of 18 giving evidence in the most serious criminal cases in the High Court, will be allowed to have it pre-recorded, sparing them the trauma of giving evidence during a trial, unless it is shown that this would significantly prejudice the interests of justice in the individual case. Last year, the Scottish Government also funded the commencement of the national roll out of a ground-breaking approach to interviews for vulnerable child victims and witnesses in criminal cases. The new Scottish Child Interview Model for Joint Investigative Interviews, conducted by highly trained police officers and social work staff, will deliver an interview process that secures the child’s best evidence at the earliest opportunity and minimises the risk of further traumatisation.

The Scottish Government’s commitment to the early diagnosis of cancer is reflected in our £44m Detect Cancer Early (DCE) Programme, which adopts a whole-systems approach to diagnosing and treating cancer as early as possible – ranging from screening and public awareness campaigns to diagnostics and data. The NHS Recovery Plan, published August 2021, commits an additional £20m for the Programme.

In terms of data, Scotland already publishes a range of quality data-sets which include blood cancers. Some examples of these are our quarterly published Cancer Waiting Times data which includes lymphomas, our annually published Cancer Mortality data which has blood and lymphatic cancers included, and our annually published Cancer Survival stats which includes blood cancers.

In addition to this, the National Cancer Data Group is an established advisory group containing relevant clinicians and stakeholders, and meets regularly in order to seek improvements in data collection to, in turn, improve cancer outcomes in Scotland.

Our officials are currently in discussion with the Blood Cancer Alliance to arrange a meeting early this year, to explore how further improved outcomes for patients diagnosed with blood cancers can be achieved.

The Fuel Poverty Strategy was published on 23 December.

The Strategy sets out a range of comprehensive actions that will be taken to tackle the drivers of fuel poverty and meet the Scottish Government’s commitment to eradicate it as far as reasonably possible by 2040 as required by the

2019 Fuel Poverty Act.

Work to deliver the actions within the Strategy will be overseen by the new statutory Scottish Fuel Poverty Advisory Panel, membership of which was also announced on 23 December.

Marine Scotland – Licensing Operations Team (“MS-LOT”) intends to publish the written report by Seagreen Wind Energy Limited in respect of unexploded ordnance clearance activities on its website (marine.gov.scot) once the internal review of the report is complete.