Question reference: S6W-03490
- Asked by: Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, Scottish Labour
- Date lodged: 5 October 2021
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Current status: Answered by Dorothy Bain on 20 October 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government what action it is taking to reduce toxicology waiting times, and by what date it expects this reduction will begin to take place.
Answer
COPFS and the University of Glasgow agreed an Improvement Plan to reduce the toxicology waiting times. This plan defined performance targets and required the University of Glasgow to provide data to COPFS on a weekly basis. The required data was to highlight the laboratory’s progress with outstanding cases and new cases.
The Improvement Plan has been successful; the toxicology waiting times are now reduced and there is no delay in provision of those reports to the pathologists who require them to finalise the post mortem report.
An indication of the effectiveness of the improvement plan is that, in the week of 25 September 2020, there were 1351 open toxicology cases with University of Glasgow and in the week of 26 September 2021 there were 351 open toxicology cases.