Chamber and committees

The Scottish Arthroplasty Project was one of a number of initiatives under review by Information Services Division in light of funding pressures. However continued collection of information on the use of arthroplasty is a necessary part of our quality strategy at the present time and it has been decided to maintain this project.

The approach of the Scottish Government and individual territorial health boards is to contain reimbursement costs for prescribed items, to encourage best practice, and to develop, in conjunction with the clinicians concerned, local prescribing budgets, which support evidence based prescribing and thus deliver optimal patient care and value for money.

The savings achieved since 2007-08 attributable respectively to improved prescribing in primary care and more effective drug purchasing in primary care are detailed in the efficiency outturn reports for 2008-09 and 2009-10. These can be accessed at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2009/11/Outturn2008-09/Q/EditMode/on/ForceUpdate/on/Page/11, and

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/10/Outturn2009-10/Q/EditMode/on/ForceUpdate/on/Page/8.

A report for 2010-11 will be published in due course.

Information Services Division has confirmed that this information is not collected centrally since it would depend on the cause of failure of the operation.

The Scottish Arthroplasty Project was set up to provide anonymised individual consultant and aggregated service outcome data on patients undergoing elective joint replacement surgery throughout Scotland.

A number of outcomes have improved following the introduction of the project. These include reduced infection and dislocation rates as well as a reduction in the number of different prostheses used in NHSScotland.

Our manifesto commitment covers all NHS employees.

In 2009, 12 patients from Scotland were transferred to England for transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI).

The National Planning Forum (NPF) reviewed the costs associated with these transfers, as part of its review of TAVI, earlier this year. The NPF found that from a sample of six cases, costs varied from £25,009 to £70,778, with an average cost of £44,213 per procedure.

This variation in cost is primarily due to varying length of stay within an intensive treatment unit following the procedure.

The Scottish Government is committed to providing economic security for the public service workforce in these challenging times. In March 2011 it announced the continuation of the existing no compulsory redundancies agreement for a further year to 31 March 2012 and is committed to extending coverage to other parts of the public sector.

Scottish ministers have no statutory powers to intervene in local government staffing matters but the Scottish Government will continue to work with and support local authorities who want to provide the assurance of no compulsory redundancies, to their staff.

Whilst the government maintains its commitment to keeping services local, I have always been clear that patient safety and the quality of care remains my paramount concern.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s decision has been informed by a review of paediatric neurosurgery and craniofacial surgery at the Southern General and Yorkhill Hospitals carried out by the Royal College of Anaesthetists in November 2010. A key recommendation of the review was to consolidate the paediatric neurological service at Yorkhill as an interim move, ahead of the relocation of the children’s hospital to the new south Glasgow hospital site in 2015.

It was the unanimous view of the Royal College review team that this interim change is necessary to provide the safest and most clinically appropriate service for children until the new hospital opens in 2015.

Quarterly data on the number of staff employed by the Scottish Government is published at (see tables 6a and 6b):

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Labour-Market/PublicSectorEmployment/PSEwebtables/Q/forceupdate/on.

The latest time period for which data is published is Q4 2010 (end of December 2010). Data for Q1 2011 (end of March 2011) will be published on 15 June 2011.