Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government provides the policies, frameworks and resources for high quality healthcare, and it is for each individual NHS Board to decide how best to utilise funding, to meet local health needs. Over the last five years, the number of Allied Health Professionals (AHP’s) across Scotland have increased by 17.8% including a 20.6% increase in Physiotherapists as at June 2024.

There is no definition of, and thus no data collected for, waiting times for community optometry services, whether urban or rural.

However, we are working closely with the three island Health Boards to resolve some local access issues.

The Scottish Government has not received correspondence with regards waiting times in Aberdeenshire.

I refer the member to the answer to the question S6W-26919 on 30 April 2024. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers

The Scottish Government continues to work with NHS Education for Scotland (NES) and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society to develop a joint programme to encourage more people, and not just school leavers, to consider careers in pharmacy. This includes targeting deprived and rural communities.

In our strategy for pharmaceutical care in Scotland ‘Achieving Excellence in Pharmaceutical Care’ (2017) we committed to enhancing access to pharmaceutical care in rural communities. We commissioned NES to work with rural Health Boards to explore mechanisms to attract more pharmacists and pharmacy technicians to work in rural communities; ensuring any associated education and training needs are flexibly met. We also committed to testing a pharmacy longitudinal clerkship.

Following a pilot with Robert Gordon University and NHS Highland, rural longitudinal clerkships were incorporated into experiential learning in 2022-23. The initiative is open to pharmacy students in the final two years of their undergraduate pharmacy course at both Scottish Schools of Pharmacy.

During Foundation Training Year, to attract potential trainee pharmacists some training providers offer multi sector/split programmes within rural locations. These programmes, where trainees spend time in more than one sector of pharmacy, are highly sought after.

In addition, to promote pharmacy technician recruitment in rural areas, a number of senior pharmacy technicians attend school careers fairs and other recruitment initiatives to raise awareness of the role.

The information requested on data held by the Scottish Government on the prevalence of postnatal depression over the past five years is not centrally available.

We are committed to ensuring equitable, coordinated access to mental health provision for women, infants and their families throughout pregnancy and during the postnatal period.

In recognising the distinctive challenges that services in the North of Scotland face in delivering care to the most severely ill women in the perinatal period, we have provided an additional £245,000 funding to develop intensive specialist support for these women, their infants and families.

In addition, we are working with NHS Grampian, Greater Glasgow & Clyde and Lothian to further support regional provision which will enable increased joint working around admissions and support care in remote and rural areas.

Between 2019 and March 2024 the Scottish Government invested £37 million in improvements to mental health services and support for parents, infants and families. As part of the Enhanced Outcomes Mental Health Framework we have allocated £123 million to Health Boards in 2024/25 to improve the quality and delivery of mental health and psychological services for all, including perinatal and infant mental health community services.

The Scottish Government is acutely aware of the challenges facing the agricultural industry in Scotland and we have been working closely with third sector partners to provide a range of mental health supports for farmers and agriculture workers.

We have provided £615,000 of funding since 2020 for the Royal Scottish Agricultural Benevolent Institution (RSABI) to provide a range of emotional and practical supports specifically focussed on agricultural workers across Scotland. This includes a helpline, online chat service, counselling, mental health first aid training, suicide prevention and financial support.

We have also provided Samaritans Scotland with over £500,000 of funding since 2021 to establish a new service in West Highlands and Skye to reach and support lone and isolated workers, many of whom are in agriculture. In addition, we have supported bereavement service pilots in NHS Ayrshire and Arran and NHS Highland to help anyone affected by suicide death, including agricultural workers.

To inform our wider support in this area, we also fund the National Rural Mental Health Forum, led by Change Mental Health. The Forum brings together over 300 organisations across all sectors to promote mental health and wellbeing and share good practice and innovation in rural and island communities.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that everyone who needs it can access well-coordinated, timely and high-quality palliative care, care around dying and bereavement support regardless of geographical location.

As part of the development of the Scottish Government’s draft strategy, ‘Palliative Care Matters for All’, the Strategy Steering Group and a number of expert working groups carried out surveys to map palliative care delivery across Scotland, including in rural and island communities. This report can be accessed at www.gov.scot/publications/palliative-care-strategy-palliative-care-matters/.

This work has been helpful in providing a clearer picture of the delivery and accessibility of palliative care services and support across Scotland and has helped to inform the actions set out in the draft strategy. The final palliative care strategy is due to published later this year.

The Scottish Government works closely with the legally categorised emergency responder organisations, including Local Authorities, who are responsible for assessing, planning, responding to and recovering from the consequences of civil contingencies emergencies, as considered in the national risk assessment documents produced by the UK and Scottish Governments, as well as the public facing Community Risk Registers produced by Scotland’s three Regional Resilience Partnerships (RRPs). These documents include specific risk assessments for both severe storms and wildfires.

Representatives of all responder agencies are required, by the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, to meet regionally in Scotland’s 3 Regional Resilience Partnership (RRP) areas, in the North, West and East and below that, 12 Local Resilience Partnerships (LRPs) are in place. The Resilience Partnerships meet to ensure plans are in place to co-ordinate a response to any kind of emergency event, including for wildfires and severe storms, should they require a multi-agency response. Existing plans are regularly tested in joint exercises and during real emergencies.

The Scottish Government Civil Contingencies Division co-chairs the Voluntary Sector Resilience Partnership which brings Cat 1 Statutory responders together with relevant Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations to discuss issues around VCS involvement in emergencies, to help empower Scotland’s communities to become more resilient.

The Scottish Government supports this partnership activity in many ways including supporting multi-agency partnership meetings, and organising a range of exercising, learning and professional development opportunities.

Community organisations in rural areas and elsewhere are uniquely placed to identify and address the issues that keep individuals in their local communities healthy.

A place-based approach is the foundation of Community-Led Local Development (CLLD). Communities are empowered and supported to design and implement the solutions to the challenges and opportunities they identify in their local area, which can include community led health and social care provision.

Through the Communities workstream within the wider Place and Wellbeing programme we are also working with the community and voluntary sector to enhance the capacity of community organisations (in rural areas and elsewhere) to complement the actions of the public sector in keeping people well. As part of the Communities Workstream we are exploring how we can increase the influence of local community organisations in the decisions that impact on the health and wellbeing of their communities.

We have also introduced participation requests as part of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015, which provide a mechanism for communities to seek dialogue with public service providers including NHS Health Boards on their own terms and become meaningfully involved in local service delivery.

The Scottish Government works closely with categorised responders, who are responsible under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 for assessing the risk of an emergency occurring, maintaining plans to ensure they can continue to perform their functions in case of an emergency, and considering whether an assessment makes it necessary or expedient to add or modify plans. Scottish Government are not however responsible for, or the owners of, any of these plans.

To support categorised responders with their duties, the Scottish Government contributes to the UK’s National Security Risk Assessment and produces the Scottish Risk Assessment to supplement this with Scotland specific analysis. These national level risk assessments consider the most serious emergencies that the UK and Scotland may face in the near future, and contain specific risk assessments for both severe storms and wildfires.