Chamber and committees

Notice is not required to be given as the beekeeper has a security pass and is fully security cleared.

The current guidance in the Care Home Infection Prevention and Control Manual (CH IPCM) produced by Antimicrobial Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection (ARHAI) Scotland states that before a resident is admitted to a care home it is important to undertake a risk assessment for infection.

At all times a thorough risk assessment should be undertaken prior to discharge to a care home to ensure that the care home is able to provide the care required and for the safety of the resident and others including staff, other residents and visitors. For example, if the individual requires to be isolated, that there is a suitable physical space and staff available for the delivery of care and support to an isolated resident.

The responsibility for carrying out individual risk assessments prior to discharge is between the individual Health Boards, Local Authorities and Integration Authorities.

From 2018 to 2023, the Scottish Government invested £28.75 million to build 55 new mobile masts in longstanding ‘notspots’, bringing 4G connectivity for the first time to communities and businesses across rural and island Scotland. The Scottish Government has also funded the creation of Infralink. This is a dedicated toolkit designed to help Scotland’s public sector organisations more easily leverage publicly owned property and assets in the rollout of new telecommunications infrastructure.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Scottish Government clinical guidance was clear that a thorough risk assessment should always be undertaken prior to discharge to ensure that the care home would be able to provide the care required. Individual risk assessments prior to discharge were the responsibility of relevant Health Boards, Local Authorities, and Integration Authorities.

It is the responsibility of integration authorities to carry out joint needs assessments as part of their strategic planning process. This information is therefore not held centrally.

Despite the powers to mandate community benefits being reserved to the UK Government, Scotland has made significant progress with the voluntary approach through the Scottish Government’s Good Practice Principles (GPPs) for Onshore Developments, which recommends community benefit equivalent to £5,000 per MW per annum. This was first published in the GPPs in 2014 and maintained in the 2019 refresh, following a public consultation and co-development with communities and industry. These Principles have been widely adopted with over £30 million offered to Scottish communities in the last 12 months.

We are currently undertaking a consultation on our Good Practice Principles for onshore and offshore renewable energy developments, which closes on the 11 April. We want to gather a wide range of views to ensure Scottish guidance supports sustainable and meaningful outcomes, and encourage everyone to take part in the consultation.

Violence towards anyone is unacceptable and the safety of our children, young people and staff at school is paramount.

Since May 2023, we have responded to schools’ concerns about relationships and behaviour in a number of ways. This includes the publication of new guidance on gender-based violence in March 2024, updating our guidance on mobile phones and anti-bullying, and providing £900k to local authorities to support training of support staff.

In August 2024, we published a joint relationships and behaviour in schools action plan with COSLA. The action plan sets out 20 actions to be taken over the next three years at both national and local level to help support schools to improve relationships and behaviour. This includes a number of actions under the theme of reducing violence and harm in schools.

In addition, through implementation of the Violence Prevention Framework for Scotland, we have invested over £4m in the last two years to help prevent and reduce violence across Scotland. In 2024-25, £2m of this investment is being used to support delivery of prevention activity focussed specially towards young people in collaboration with a range of partners. This includes:

• £156,000 to support the delivery of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), a peer mentoring programme , delivered in schools and supported by Education Scotland.
• £337,000, to support Medics Against Violence who run a number of violence prevention programmes, including a secondary school programme carried out by volunteer medics, centred around educating young people about the impacts and consequences of violence and how to keep themselves and their peers safe, and;
• £56,000, to support the Police Scotland Youth Volunteers Programme, aimed at young people aged 13-18, which provides the opportunity to engage positively within their local community.
• £297,000 to support The No Knives, Better Lives engagement programme through Youthlink Scotland, which is focussed on preventing the incidence of violence including knife carrying amongst young people and provides resources, training and support to local partners.
• The creation and launch of the Quit Fighting for Likes campaign, for practitioners to use to have conversations with young people, to help them explore the harm caused through the filming and sharing of violent incidents on social media.

The Scottish Government engages regularly with the college sector on a range of issues, including the 2025-26 budget, via Colleges Scotland.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) publishes statistics on the length of time patients wait to be seen as a new outpatient or admitted for treatment as an inpatient or day case in the Stage of Treatment (SoT) publication. The latest publication release contains data up to quarter ending 30 September 2024.

Statistics relating to the total number of ongoing waits and the number of waits with a wait length over 52 weeks by specialty from 31 December 2019 can be found in the ‘Waits over 52 weeks’ data table in sheets ‘Table 3.1.1’ for new outpatient appointments, and ‘Table 3.2.1’ for inpatient or day case admissions.

https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/30453/waits_over_52_weeks_nov24.xlsx

Longer trend information can be found in the following tables:

New outpatient appointments (‘1.6 Table’): https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/30080/newop_nov24.xlsx

Inpatient or day case admission (‘2.6 Table’): https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/30452/ipdc_nov24.xlsx

The Scottish Government supports participation in recreational fishing in several ways.