Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government acknowledges the importance of transparent and comprehensive reporting on integration performance indicators as highlighted in the Accounts Commission’s report, Integration Joint Boards' Finance and performance 2024. The four national performance indicators that have not been finalised for reporting are:

• Indicator 10: Percentage of staff who say they would recommend their workplace as a good place to work.
• Indicator 21: Percentage of people admitted to hospital from home during the year, who are discharged to a care home.
• Indicator 22: Percentage of people who are discharged from hospital within 72 hours of being ready.
• Indicator 23: Expenditure on end of life care.

These indicators are not currently reported on because there is not yet a nationally agreed definition or the necessary national data is either unavailable or not sufficiently robust.

Robust data and digital infrastructure will be a key enabler of both our Data Strategy and the National Care Service. The Scottish Government continues to identify and invest in innovative digital and data solutions to support improvements in social care, and integrated care, such as the integrated social care and health record.

Work is ongoing to develop the integrated social care and health record, including extensive co-design as part of the wider NCS programme, with those who will use the record – such as individuals in receipt of care and frontline staff – at the centre of that design.

Local recruitment is the responsibility of the Health Board with the Scottish Government providing support for workforce planning. Since December 2023, Scottish Government officials have met nursing leadership in all territorial Boards and all universities offering the post graduate health visiting course. These discussions included exploring recruitment and retention challenges and successes. Innovative recruitment and retention practices, identified as part of those discussions, will be shared across all Health Board partners.

Attraction and retention of people into nursing and midwifery more generally is a key part of the remit of the Nursing and Midwifery Taskforce. The Taskforce, chaired by the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, will recommend a workplan of actions to support workforce sustainability, workplace culture, practice, flexibility, recruitment and retention, alongside the diversification of training pathways.

The answer to S6W-28648 stated that 3,308 certificates of exemption for XL Bully dogs have been issued to dog owners by the Scottish Government during the period 1 April 2024 to 31 July 2024. This reflected the number of exemptions issued when the PQ answer was developed and there can be a short time lag between an answer being drafted by the Scottish Government and the PQ being answered.

The figure that was provided by the Scottish Government to the Scottish Sun newspaper was that, as of Thursday 1 August, there have been 3,342 applications for exemption certificates for XL Bully dogs approved.

The difference in figure is explained by the time-lag noted above meaning that 34 additional manually produced exemption certificates issued by the Scottish Government after 31 July 2024 were included in the figure given to the Scottish Sun, but not in the PQ answer.

It may be helpful to be aware that the Scottish Government is continuing to work through a small number of cases where XL Bully dog owners have met the legal requirement to apply before 31 July 2024, but still require to provide additional information in order for their exemption application to be processed and granted.

I have asked Teresa Medhurst, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service (SPS), to respond. Her response is as follows:

SPS currently share information regarding the number of individuals released under Emergency Early Release (ER) on the SPS website. Further work has commenced on an analysis of the entire ER tranche data, and the SPS hope to be able to publish a full data report, which will be available on the SPS website by the end of August.

SPS continue to be as open and transparent as possible, whilst continuing to meet our statutory obligation to ensure that those in our care have their personal information protected; as such we have taken the decision not to publish a breakdown of establishments of those released under the ER scheme as some of the data could relate to a small group of individuals, which may lead to their inadvertent identification. SPS will however, share information that does include individual local authorities and health boards as part of the released data set.

The Scottish Government has provided support for employees affected by developments at Carpetright through our Partnership Action for Continuing Employment (PACE) initiative.In agreement with Carpetright's Talent Acquisition Manager, a PACE Introduction to Redundancy Support webinar took place on 7 August for all impacted staff across Scotland to inform them of the support on offer. In addition, information on PACE services has been issued to the impacted staff to support their self-referral to partnership services. Skills Development Scotland will also be undertaking promotion of PACE support to former Carpetright staff via social media activity.Through providing skills development and employability support, PACE aims to minimise the time individuals affected by redundancy are out of work.

Following Stage 2, we will provide a revised Financial Memorandum for Stage 2 amendments that have been agreed to which will also note the value of costs incurred to date on the Bill.

We remain committed to Phase 2 of the 2018 GP Contract and ensuring the stability and sustainability of general practice.

Discussions with the BMA on Phase 2 are ongoing and we are developing a refreshed delivery plan for this work – this will include a revised timeline for delivery.

Since 2019, NHS Tayside has been focusing on developing and stabilising breast cancer services. They have successfully recruited new Breast Oncologists to their local service, including two Breast Clinical Oncologists who work solely for NHS Tayside alongside a joint Breast Medical Oncologist post with NHS Lothian.

NHS Tayside is replacing a radiotherapy linac machine, which has generated some constraints in physical radiotherapy capacity. To ensure patients can access radiotherapy in a timely manner, NHS Tayside has collaborated with NHS Highland to offer faster access to radiotherapy for a small number of patients with breast cancer. Once the linac is fully replaced, and with the new breast oncologists now in place, NHS Tayside will deliver the full pathway of Breast Cancer Care locally with a continued drive to improve patient experiences and outcomes.

We intend to resume Tranche 1 of the Sustainability Loan Scheme in 2024-25 once we have completed the disbursement of funds for those loans already completed and confirmed a budget. This will likely not be until midway through the financial year.

Our preference remains to continue the loan scheme into Tranche 2 and beyond – however, this is dependent on whether the UK Government resumes the allocation of Financial Transaction Capital to the Scottish Government.

In November 2022 the Ministerial Population Taskforce published the research report ‘Attitudes to Family Formation in Scotland’ to update the evidence base about fertility, family planning, and ideal family size in Scotland.

Building on international engagement with other countries experiencing low birth rates, the Scottish Government is taking forward comparative work about family friendly policies in other European countries, to establish if successful interventions elsewhere could be applicable in Scotland.

The outputs of this work will be considered alongside recent Census data in order to develop next steps which reflect Scottish Ministers’ ambition for Scotland to be the best possible place for all families.