Chamber and committees

The Scottish Budget: 2024 to 2025 allocated £2.2 million to the Scan for Safety programme. Funds available will meet initial costs of new systems and necessary licences; provide boards with advisors on implementation; meet the costs of scanning handsets; and, help to introduce scanning in services where implanted devices are used.

We recognise the scale and impact of heart disease across Scotland and have set out our strategic direction to address this in our 2021 Heart Disease Action Plan. This includes actions to ensure that people with suspected heart disease have timely and equitable access to diagnosis, treatment and care.

We are making progress in the delivery of these actions including the development of nationally agreed pathways and ensuring the effective use of data to drive improvements.

We expect Health Boards’ 2024-25 annual delivery plans (due March) to clearly set out how they will increase productivity and reduce waiting times across all inpatient, day-case, outpatient specialities.

The Heart Disease Action Plan recognises the need to ensure timely and equitable access to diagnostics, including echocardiography. We remain committed to supporting Boards to target resources to reduce waiting times through service innovation and redesign.

This includes the Centre for Sustainable Delivery's (CfSD) Accelerated National Innovation Adoption Pathway (ANIA) which focuses on using technology to fast-track proven innovations into the healthcare frontline that will improve patient outcomes.

As part of this work, CfSD is currently considering the roll out of innovations that optimise delivery of the heart failure diagnostic pathway, in which access to echocardiography is an important component.

The information requested on what the current vacancy rate is for cardiac physiologists in NHS Scotland is not centrally available.

Information on Healthcare Science staff in post and cardiology consultants, can be found on the TURAS NHS Education for Scotland workforce statistics site at: NHS Scotland workforce | Turas Data Intelligence .

The Scottish Government has been committed to ensuring that all children in primary school receive at least two hours of physical education (PE) each school week since 2011. Our decision to set a target of two hours of PE for primary school children was prompted by recommendations made by the National Physical Activity Task Force which recommended “taking part in at least two hours of quality physical education classes a week and gaining the appropriate movement and behavioural skills needed for an active life”.

The Scottish Government is continuing to provide a range of recruitment support, training and development activity to assist Health Boards in securing an appropriate mix of experienced and newly qualified staff for their National Treatment Centres (NTCs). As at 30 September 2023, close to 600 people were employed in an NTC, of which around 32% were undertaking their first role in NHS Scotland.

We keep under active review the total number of staff that we will ultimately need to recruit to our National Treatment Centres and to support the overall ambition to increase planned care activity and reduce waiting times, as set out in the NHS Recovery Plan.

The National Treatment Centres (NTCs) Programme is the single biggest increase in planned care capacity ever created in NHS Scotland. Five new National Treatment Centres (NTCs) will be opened by 2024 at Golden Jubilee (Phase 1 and 2), NTC Fife, NTC Highland and NTC Forth Valley. Combined these centres will have eight orthopaedic theatres; an inpatient/day-case ward; three endoscopy rooms and two general theatres.

As a result of the almost 10% cut in our capital budget from the UK Government, we are having to revise our pipeline of infrastructure investment and we do not expect National Treatment Centres in Ayrshire and Arran, Grampian, Lanarkshire, Lothian and Tayside to be progressed in the short to medium term. The figure of 40,000 additional activities from the 2021 recovery plan is dependent on all National Treatment Centres in development being operational, therefore we expect the additional annual activity from the programme to be 20,000 from 2024-25.

sportscotland’s budget has remained stable this year, with a £100k reduction due to a reduced requirement for non-cash funding and offsetting increase in resource requirement, both relating to recent accounting changes.

We have committed to ensure that the Active Schools programme is free for all children and young people by the end of this Parliament. sportscotland works in partnership with all 32 local authorities to invest in and support Active Schools. Active Schools is dedicated to developing and supporting the delivery of high quality sport and physical activity opportunities to all children and young people, taking an inclusive approach and providing targeted opportunities where there is a need. Data published by sportscotland shows significantly increased participation levels across the past academic year (2022-23), with 4.6 million visits to Active Schools sessions, a rise of 34% on 2021-22.

We are working to ensure lessons identified from our policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic are put in place and that policy across government is better able to respond to the next pandemic. This includes clear responsibilities for preparedness and response; to include NHS resilience, Scottish Resilience (through SGORR), and cross-Scottish Government policy consideration of our existing plans, drawing on learnings including the UK Chief Medical Officers Technical report on the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK and Public Health Scotland’s National Incident Management Team reporting.

We are working with the UK Government and other administrations to strengthen the capabilities and countermeasures required to address future pandemics, including retaining stockpiles of PPE and the purchase of vaccines and medicines. We have established a Standing Committee on Pandemic Preparedness which provided interim recommendations on future pandemic preparedness in August 2022. We anticipate that the Standing Committee on Pandemic Preparedness will provide its final report in the summer 2024 for consideration.

We are committed to responding to both the UK and Scottish Covid-19 inquiries, as learning lessons from the pandemic is vital to prepare for the future.

Waiting times for planned care services is one of many metrics that contributes to the monitoring of performance and effectiveness across NHSScotland.

There have been several changes to waiting time targets and standards over the last 30 years. The Patient Rights (Scotland) Act 2011 established a 12 week Treatment Time Guarantee (TTG) written into legislation for eligible patients who are due to receive planned inpatient or day case treatment from 1 October 2012. The Act states that eligible patients must start to receive that treatment within 12 weeks (84 days) of the treatment being agreed. This guarantee is based on completed waits where a patient is removed from the list after being admitted for treatment.

To support the above guarantee, from 31 March 2010 no patient should wait longer than 12 weeks for a new outpatient appointment at a consultant-led clinic. More information on this can be found on the Public Health Scotland website section on waiting times .

More recently, in July 2022 new targets were set out for NHSScotland to address the impact of the pandemic on long waiting times for planned care. Public Health Scotland publish progress against these targets quarterly: Stage of treatment waiting times - Inpatients, day cases and new outpatients quarter ending 30 September 2023 - NHS waiting times - stage of treatment - Publications - Public Health Scotland