Chamber and committees

For 2021-22 and 2022-23, I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-08999 on 20 June 2022. 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

Future year’s planned expenditure will be determined and set out in each year’s Scottish Budget.

Each financial year, NHS Boards are typically required to deliver a level of efficiency savings to deliver financial balance. Efficiency savings are how health boards ensure they are making the best possible use of public money and every penny of efficiency savings stays with the health boards.

We are working closely with all NHS Boards to address financial pressures facing the system, whilst ensuring that patient safety and Covid recovery remain the priority.

The number of vacant posts in each NHS Board can be found on the NHS Education for Scotland (NES) website: NHSScotland workforce | Turas Data Intelligence

To ensure all Health Boards including NHS Fife have sufficient capacity planning guidance has been issued to support the production of new Three Year Workforce Plans, supported by local systems’ workforce data.

As part of this all Health Boards must consider local population health needs and projected service demand, using that information to assess current staffing capacity and any relevant staffing gaps.

At national level, we will use this intelligence to inform new staffing projections for health and social care, which will be published in the coming year as part of the National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care.

The Bus Priority Rapid Deployment Fund (BPRDF) ran from July 2020 until June 2021 and was designed to support local authorities – working closely with bus operators - to respond to congestion with interventions such as temporary bus lanes or gates. 41 bus priority projects were implemented across Scotland.

Though the Fund was for short-term measures, it provided an opportunity for local authorities to test interventions as they developed plans for longer-term investment in bus priority, to lock in benefits for bus passengers, the bus industry and the environment. Learning and evidence from BPRDF informed local authority applications to the Bus Partnership Fund, which opened in July 2021 for bids to develop and deliver permanent bus priority infrastructure on local roads.

The Scottish Government recognises that seal predation is one of a number of pressures affecting wild Atlantic salmon in rivers, which is why it commissioned work in partnership with Crown Estate Scotland to review measures that have been adopted globally and which could assist in developing non-lethal strategies to address seal predation on salmon in Scottish rivers.

The report ( Review of non-lethal seal control options to limit seal predation on salmonids in rivers and at finfish farms | Marine Scotland Data Publications ) which was published in March 2021 recognises that there is no single effective solution to address the problem given the nature of rivers and predation, but that there are a range of measures that have been shown to have some success or have the potential to reduce predation. The Scottish Government therefore continues to work with the sector, stakeholders and the scientific community to explore practical ways to address interactions between salmon and seals in rivers, building on the recommendation of the report.

Furthermore, the Sea Mammal Research Unit, at the University of St Andrews has provided significant advice and support to the River Dee in recent years in relation to quantifying seal presence in the river and exploring possible solutions for minimising interactions.

There is currently specialist perinatal mental health provision in every mainland Health Board. We are working intensively with Boards to build their provision to the levels outlined in Delivering Effective Services . As of May 2022, there were 12 Health Boards with specialist community perinatal mental health teams, eight of which were fully established. These are: Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, Fife, Forth Valley, Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire, Lothian and Tayside.

We are working closely with other Boards to ensure that services will be fully established by March 2023. This includes island Boards where regional working as well as Board level provision is a key priority area.

COSLA leaders and Ministers have now agreed the funding package to support the development of Local Heat and Energy Efficiency Strategies (LHEES) for the 2022-23 financial year. This funding package will be treated as a redetermination of the General Revenue Grant and paid in the last 2 weeks of March 2023. This funding could be used to cover internal resourcing and/or procurement of external technical services. Scottish Government officials have already communicated the agreement of the funding to local authorities and will also provide further guarantees and details via COSLA's official channels in due course .

Board’s baseline revenue allocations are set out annually in the Scottish Budget, as published on the Scottish Government’s website. In addition, resource and capital spending limits are reported in Board’s annual accounts, which are published on their websites.

Over the period from 2013-14 to 2022-23, NHS Fife’s baseline resource budget has increased by almost 39% (£209.9 million) .

In addition to baseline capital funding, significant additional investment has been provided to NHS Fife to fund infrastructure projects, including £20.5 million for the National Treatment Centre Orthopaedics Unit.

Since it was established in April 2020, there have been 88 successful claims to the Mother and Baby Unit (MBU) Family Fund. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lothian do not hold comprehensive information about a claimant’s home Board. Since April 2020:

? 32 families made a claim to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde MBU, with an average amount claimed of £303.

? 56 families made a claim to the NHS Lothian MBU, with an average claim of £250.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) is unable to provide information on how many patients have died while on an NHS Scotland waiting list in each year as far back as 1999. However, the national waiting times datamart captures quality-assured data on the reasons for a patient being removed from a waiting list, including when a patient has died, from 1st April 2013 onwards.

Table 1 contains the following trend information for the period 1 st April 2013 to 31 March 2022, presented by financial year:

? The number of patients waiting to be seen at a new outpatient appointment or waiting to be admitted for treatment as an inpatient or day case, expressed as an average based on the number waiting at the end of quarters in each financial year.

? The number of removals from waiting lists for the reason ‘died’.

? A simple mortality rate is also included to account for variation in waiting list sizes. This is presented as the number of deaths per year per 1000 patients waiting at quarter-end, averaged over the quarters provided for each year.

Table 1: Average waiting list size and total number of patients removed from lists for the reason ‘died’ whilst waiting for a new outpatient appointment or treatment as an inpatient or day case, NHSScotland, April 2013 to March 2022