Chamber and committees

The Green Heat Finance Taskforce last met on 17 May 2023 and will next meet on 5 July 2023. Notes of Taskforce meetings are published on the Scottish Government’s website.

The total funding provided to the University of Stirling to fund the Overdose Alert and Response Technologies: State-of-the-art Review is £59,978.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on electricity generation in a form that can be broken down into the spatial area occupied by each renewable generating station.

The Scottish Government receives data on electricity generation from the UK Government Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. This data is not broken down to site level.

The Scottish Wide Area Network has been widely used across all of the NHS and much of the rest of the public sector in Scotland since 2014. With the contract coming to an end, procurement was commenced and the contract for the ongoing delivery of SWAN was awarded to BT on 12th April 2023 for 6 years. Work is now underway to transition organisations from the incumbent supplier to the new BT-supported network from August 2023 (with planned roll out of new service still scheduled for 2026).

Phase 1 of Mind to Mind is complete and offers people short videos on how people living with mental health conditions manage them and signposts to support services. We are currently scoping a second phase which is anticipated to include more diversity of lived experiences and a focus on self-help and self-care.

The Leading in the Digital Age Board Development Workshops has undergone two stages of development. The first stage was the design of the content which involved engaging with users and stakeholders to inform the resources required and workshop content. The next stage has involved training the facilitators and further development of content. This work is now moving into the testing phase.

The Scottish Government actively promotes cyber security to reduce the risk of cyber-attacks and protect against the unauthorised exploitation of systems, networks, and technologies. This has included the creation of NHS Scotland’s Cyber Centre of Excellence (CCoE), which opened in December 2022 in Abertay Universities cyberQuarter.

Working with the CCoE, we continue to prioritise the use security capabilities of existing technologies and deployment of new security tools. This approach allows real time discovery of vulnerabilities and potential issues across a national view.

The Cyber Centre of Excellence is complimented by the Scottish Cyber Coordination Centre (SC3) which will be a key partner, enhancing our national incident response capacity and capabilities.

This is in addition to the annual NIS audit of NHS boards to ensure their current practices are up to date and that their responses reflect current best practice.

The recently released Data Strategy for Health and Social Care sets out our intent to improve the capture, storage and use of protected characteristics data. The Scottish Government is currently exploring the range of methods to achieve the commitment made in both the Delivery Plan and Data Strategy, including the significant opportunities presented by the new CHI system that is due to be operational in autumn of this year.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-18798 on 20 June 2023. 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

Initial work to capture the position of learning and development in digital skills has been undertaken. This will help inform our review of governance and the associated programme for digital capabilities across health and care.