Chamber and committees

As this is an operational matter for Scottish Water, and the Scottish Government does not hold this information, I have asked them to respond. Their reply is as follows:

The annual cost of blockages related to wet wipes and other items is some £7.5 million. The number of total blockages in 2024 was 34,635. Notably, around 80% of these blockages are due to the wrong items being put into the sewer network, such as wet wipes, sanitary products, and fats, oils, and grease.

Scottish Government recognises the challenges facing oncology services and our workforce as demand increases across NHS Scotland. We are working with NHS Scotland to address staffing as a matter of urgency, working closely with NHS Board and clinical leaders from across the country to address pressures in a sustainable way.

We have established the National Oncology Coordination Group to provide a coordinated and collaborative response to immediate and foreseeable service pressures. It provides rapid real-time assessment of highest risk services and proactively develops risk mitigation proposals, in line with the overall strategic aim for cancer.

We continue to take action to address workforce pressures. Actions include expanding the Clinical Oncology and Medical Oncology specialty training programmes and providing £6.6 million of additional funding to Systemic Anti-Cancer Therapy (SACT) and Acute Oncology to increase regional working, workforce recruitment and to maximise capacity across the existing workforce.

More than £106 million has been allocated to NHS Boards in 2025-26 to address waiting times, with £21 million for imaging. We will reduce the radiology backlog so that 95% of referrals are seen within six weeks by March 2026, through expanding to seven-day services, recruitment, and utilising mobile scanning units.

The Scottish Government recognises that NHS Scotland’s oncology capacity has been increasingly tested due to steady, long-term increases in demand driven by new medicines approvals, increasing complexity of treatment, an ageing population, more treatments for incurable cancers, and delayed presentations exacerbated by the pandemic.

The National Oncology Taskforce commissioned the Scottish Cancer Network to undertake an Oncology Workforce Review, completed January 2023 with a proposal for an Oncology Transformation Programme (OTP). We have mobilised the ambitious Oncology Transformation Programme and work to progress this is moving at pace. This includes consideration of workforce and training requirements, recognising that our NHS workforce is fundamental in delivering excellent and equitably accessible cancer care.

The Scottish Government is committed to collaborate with key partners across the NHS in Scotland to ensure that relevant information, with the appropriate safeguards in place, is available to all healthcare professionals, including community pharmacists, when and where they need it.

As community pharmacists expand their clinical role, there is an increasing need for them to have read/write access to clinical records to ensure that they can safely assess and agree a clinical management plan for a person and any associated actions or treatments can be viewed by other healthcare professionals involved in a person’s care, without any unnecessary delay.

Community pharmacists currently have access to the Emergency Care Summary (ECS) which provides information on recent acute and repeat prescriptions and allergies and the Key Information Summary (KIS) where available, which provides information about a person’s health issues, a carer’s name and contact details, preferences on how a person would like to be cared for, the treatment they would like and where they would like to be cared for.

In addition, several health boards are providing community pharmacists access to their clinical portal which provides additional clinical information, although the level of access varies from Health Board to Health Board. Clinical portals support Health Boards to allow healthcare professionals to access information about an individual, including in some cases those from other Health Boards when required, with their permission.

There are several barriers that currently make full access to clinical records difficult including the interoperability of the different IT systems used across the NHS and providing assurances on data protection and information governance requirements.

The Chief Pharmaceutical Officer is exploring how read/write access to clinical records can be delivered incrementally.

Under the new model, neonatal intensive care will be delivered in three Neonatal Units in Scotland, the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and Aberdeen Maternity Hospital.

Of the 44,835 births in the year to 31 March 2024, numbers fluctuate, but Public Health Scotland data reports that around 4554 babies, in the same period, were admitted to neonatal care. The vast majority of babies (around 2300) needed Special Care or Transitional Care (delivered on postnatal wards). A further 1,200 needed High Dependency care, and around 800 were admitted to Neonatal Intensive Care. Around 50 – 60 of these babies a year will be affected by the change in model of care and will have their care delivered in one of the three neonatal intensive care units.

Babies will normally be cared for in the unit closest to home. In the north of Scotland, the Aberdeen neonatal unit already cares for babies from Grampian, Highland and the Island Boards, and at times of extreme pressure on neonatal intensive care, may also care for babies from other parts of Scotland.

Under the new model the smallest and sickest Tayside babies would be transferred to Aberdeen or Edinburgh. In 2024, 11 babies were born at less than 27 weeks gestation in Tayside Health Board, plus a small number of babies who require complex intensive care.

Scottish Government commissioned Consulting firm RSM UK Consulting LLP to undertake detailed modelling work to fully map the capacity requirements across the system to inform capacity building and implementation of the new model. The report was published on the 29 May 2024.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publish employment rate estimates for 16 to 64 year olds by Scottish parliamentary constituency from the ONS Annual Population Survey (APS). The latest available estimates are for January to December 2024:

LI02.1 Regional labour market: local indicators for constituencies of the Scottish Parliament - Office for National Statistics

ONS state that although the APS estimates are robust at headline regional level, there are concerns with the quality of the estimates in recent years for smaller groups of the population such as local authority and Scottish parliamentary constituency level estimates.

The Scottish Government has continually supported Scottish Water’s public awareness campaigns on the correct disposal of sanitary items, including wet wipes. Their current ‘Nature Calls’ campaign has a specific focus on binning and not flushing wet wipes. In addition, we have supported various public awareness campaigns run by environmental NGOs, including the Marine Conservation Society which is a valued member of our Marine Litter Strategy Steering Group.

There are no regulations in Scotland relating to the ‘flushability’ of wet wipes, therefore there can be no associated enforcement activities or penalties imposed upon companies. Our forthcoming regulations to restrict market access to wet wipes containing plastic are centred on the material content of the product, and these regulations will be enforceable if wet wipes containing plastic are sold or supplied outwith the exemptions for medical or industrial uses.

Whilst the Scottish Government sets the strategic policy direction for the NHS in Scotland, operational matters including staffing are in the first instance the responsibility of the relevant NHS board.

Decisions will depend on the service needs of each board taking account of national, regional and local priorities, and we expect NHS boards to plan and provide safe, effective and high-quality care, in line with their statutory service provision and workforce planning responsibilities.

In line with the requirements of the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act 2019, the Scottish Government expects Health Boards to ensure that at all times there are sufficient suitably qualified staff to support the provision of high-quality care.

This includes reviewing staffing levels daily, with decisions regarding real time staffing being made on an ongoing basis.

The Scottish Government have 880 live contracts and frameworks of which 42 are with voluntary organisations with details of these publicly available on the Public Contracts Scotland contract register. The Scottish Government requires suppliers to account for employment-related costs in its procurement processes, ensuring compliance with employment law and fair workforce practices and none have identified employment exclusions in the costs.