Chamber and committees

A public consultation on the draft Framework for Chronic Pain Service Delivery is expected to begin this Autumn. We are grateful for the input provided to date by people with lived experience, clinical, third-sector and other stakeholders in helping us to shape this draft and welcome further feedback as part of the public consultation in order to help us improve services and support for people with chronic pain in Scotland.

The definition of race underpinning the Education Scotland resource Promoting and Developing Race Equality and Anti-Racist Education: An Overview is the definition present in the Equality Act 2010. This definition encompasses white ethnic groups, including white Irish. The experience of Irish people is also referenced in the Changing the Race Equality Paradigm in Education Scotland’s Understanding race and racism wakelet for practitioners. An Education Scotland website to support the publication of their resource, to go live by the end of September, will be regularly updated to include resources for practitioners relating to different minority ethnic groups who experience discrimination.

The Scottish Government has been working closely with Health Boards to ensure they will be ready to assume responsibility of routine vaccination programmes by the April 2022 deadline of the Vaccination Transformation Programme. Health Boards regularly report on their progress in transferring vaccination programmes and attend regular meetings with Scottish Government officials, ensuring appropriate oversight of plans, and providing a forum for any issues or challenges to be addressed.

NHS Scotland are working with colleagues in some international countries to create a system that will enable them to collect the appropriate information. A range of mechanisms is currently under consideration for how this can be done most effectively and efficiently.

This information requested is not currently available.

The breakdown of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) workforce is published on a quarterly basis through the NHS Education for Scotland (NES) CAMHS Workforce publication. This data can be found on the NES Turas Data Intelligence platform and provides a breakdown of staffing per NHS Board in CAMHS, including breakdown of professional role.

In May 2021, we allocated £16.4 million to support NHS Boards to implement the National CAMHS Service Specification. In addition, on 14 September, we announced £10.83 million funding to further support the implementation. Through this funding, NHS Boards have started to recruit additional staff to implement the Specification and to build professional capacity to support children and young people with neurodevelopmental support needs. NHS Boards will recruit a variety of staff in different roles, based on individual service needs.

The removal of public call boxes (PCBs) is subject to the rules in the telephony universal service obligations. In order to remove PCBs BT has to go through a consultation process with local authorities. There is no direct role for Scottish Government. As telecoms regulator, Ofcom is in the process of reviewing these obligations and intend to publish a consultation in the coming weeks.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-02795 on 21 September 2021. 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 has not made representations to Police Scotland, in relation to the work by the International Development and Innovation Unit, in providing training to police forces from other countries, as the Scottish Police Authority has responsibility for oversight of Police Scotland and to scrutinise the decisions of the Chief Constable.