Chamber and committees

We understand from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde that there were 18 new diagnoses in the 2018 calendar year in people who inject drugs in Glasgow. Of those, two have moved to other health boards. All of the 16 still resident in Glasgow have started HIV treatment.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde is leading the response to the HIV outbreak amongst people who inject drugs in Glasgow. This is an important issue; I take a keen interest in the response to this outbreak and note that a great deal of work is going into supporting this vulnerable group.

We are providing £2.13m over three years to third sector organisations to support innovative work to tackle poor sexual health and reduce blood borne virus transmissions. This includes funding for Scottish Drugs Forum to work with people who inject drugs to help them reduce risk behaviours connected with HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

NHS Lothian and NHS Highland have reported that they currently have waiting lists for access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP).

The number of needles distributed to drugs users in Glasgow in; (a) 2015-16 can be found at
https://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Drugs-and-Alcohol-Misuse/Publications/2017-06-13/2017-06-13-IEP-Report.pdf ;

(b) 2016-17 can be found at
https://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Drugs-and-Alcohol-Misuse/Publications/2018-08-07/2018-08-07-IEP-Report.pdf .

The data for 2017-18 and 2018-19 will be published by Information Services Division in due course.

The Scottish Government is taking a number of measures to ensure Scottish domiciled students from all sectors of society can access medical courses. By 2021 overall medical undergraduate numbers will have increased by 190 places (or 22%) over 2016 levels. This includes, since 2016, 50 ring-fenced widening access places focused on SIMD 20 applicants. For the 2019-20 intake, we have set a new target for Scottish domiciled and the rest of EU medical students in line with Scottish Government guidance to increase retention of medical students, replacing 100 rest of UK medical students with 100 Scottish domiciled/EU students on a phased basis over the next three years. We have also increased the number of students on our targeted pre-medical entry courses from 40 to 50, focused on socially disadvantaged as well as remote & rural applicants, and continue to fund our Scottish Graduate Entry (ScotGEM) programme which includes a return of service bursary.

The Scottish Government is already taking substantive steps to support families from before birth through the critical early years of a child’s life.

We published our Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan – Year One Progress Report on 26 June which sets out actions we have taken over the past year to tackle child poverty. In this report we set out the support Scottish Government provides to children and families through the course of their lives.

This includes: the Universal Health Visiting Pathway; Best Start Grant payments, Best Start Food payments from August 2019; and the doubling of Early Learning and Childcare to 1140 hours.

Moreover the recently announced Scottish Child Payment will provide further support of £10 per week, per child with no limit on the number of children families can receive support for. The benefit will be fully rolled out by 2022, with early-rollout available in 2021 for children under six. The benefit will mean that a family with two children will be more than £1000 better off each year.

All of these actions are taken as part of a wider, direct, investment of roughly £527 million specifically targeted at low income families with children, which does not include the universal investment which supports all families with children in Scotland.

The Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan is backed by the £50 million Tackling Child Poverty Fund, as announced in Programme for Government 2017-18. Current investment is set out within the first annual progress report published in June 2019.

The Fund is supporting innovative projects to tackle and reduce levels of child poverty in Scotland so minority ethnic households will benefit from all of the programmes supported from the Fund.

In addition, we have outlined that the Fund will invest £500,000 (2020-22) to work directly with Gypsy/Traveller families and other partners on our community education programme.

The current Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) census is collected annually from centres delivering funded ELC in September. It was designed to capture the number of funded registrations with ELC providers, along with some additional breakdowns such as stage and additional support needs. The methodology makes it difficult to capture more detailed information at an aggregate level, such as ethnicity, without encountering quality issues and placing a significant burden of collection on providers.

It has been recognised for some time that the current ELC census is not sufficient to provide the information necessary to manage this growing sector, and so since 2015 we have been carrying out a development project to transform the ELC census to an individual level child census. The new census process will be based on extractions of data from management information systems, and will collect more information on the characteristics of children registered for funded ELC, including ethnicity. Data from the new census will be available in 2021.

I refer the member to Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) Bib number: 60845

The following table provides a breakdown of 2019-20 NHS Board allocations to support the implementation of the Standards for Tier 2 and 3 Weight Management Services for Children and Young People, which were published by NHS Health Scotland on Tuesday 2 July: http://www.healthscotland.scot/publications/standards-for-the-delivery-of-tier-2-and-tier-3-weight-management-services-in-scotland . This is in addition to funding provided to NHS Boards through the Outcomes Framework for adult and child healthy weight.