Chamber and committees

Scottish Government officials are in regular contact with Cornerstone and Unison about the dispute.

The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport and Councillor Currie from COSLA wrote to both organisations in 21 December 2018 offering support towards reaching an agreement and arrangements have been made for a meeting involving all parties. In advance of this meeting, Scottish Government and COSLA officials will continue to engage and meet with both organisations to support progress towards reaching a resolution. The detailed information requested is being placed in the Parliament's Reference Centre (Bib number 60413).

The Scottish Government does not collect information on non-disclosure agreements from universities, and therefore does not hold this information centrally.

The Scottish Government will publish outcomes from the Race Equality Conference and a final report on Year 1 Race Equality Actions on its website in the spring. The slides used in the evidence and analysis workshop have already been published on the Scottish Government’s Equality Evidence Finder.

The current membership of the Common Financial Tool Working Group is as follows:

Graeme Perry, Accountant in Bankruptcy (Chair)

Laura Barr, Accountant in Bankruptcy (Minute Secretary)

Annette Burns, Accountant in Bankruptcy

Mike Holmyard, Citizens Advice Scotland

Pauline Allan, Citizens Advice Scotland

Alan McIntosh, Inverclyde Council for the Local Authority Money Advice Service

Yvonne MacDermid, Money Advice Scotland

David Hilferty, Money Advice Scotland

Karen Hurst, Association of British Credit Unions Limited (ABCUL)

Liv McVey, StepChange

Daniel Kelly, Money Advice Service

David Menzies, Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS)

Barry Mochan, MLM Solutions for the Insolvency Practitioners Association

The most recent meetings held on 12 December 2018 and 17 January 2019 have been chaired by John Cook, Depute Accountant in Bankruptcy and Executive Director of Case Operations at AiB.

The information is not collected or held centrally to the level of detail requested .

This is a matter for Health Boards to manage and monitor at a local level. As employers NHSScotland Boards are required, under the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, the 1992 Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations and the 1998 Working Time Regulations, to provide access to appropriate rest room facilities where staff, including anaesthetic staff, can take their natural breaks when working overnight. All staff working shifts overnight are not entitled to sleeping facilities. However, if they are on-call and required for clinical reasons to stay in the hospital, appropriate sleeping facilities are provided.

Since 2004, NHS Scotland guidance has recognised the necessity for appropriate on-call facilities for anaesthetists and this was extended in 2007 to include all senior on call staff. HBN 26 - 'Facilities for surgical procedures (2004)' says:

5.59 Anaesthetist on-call facilities are required within the department. Facilities should include a bed, en-suite shower/WC, clothes storage, a hand-wash basin, a desk and chair, and a computer with connection to IT services. This space should be linked into the staff communication system.

SHPN 22 - 'Accident and emergency facilities for adults and children' (2007) states:

4.11 For senior on-call staff, a minimum of one single en-suite bed/sitting room that provides overnight accommodation is required within the department. The planning team should decide on the number, size and location of rooms following local consultation.

The Scottish Government believes that this guidance provides sufficient clarity as to what rest faclities need to be provided for medical staff and this would be provided and managed locally by NHS Boards. Compliance against these standards is measured through the Statutory Compliance Audit and Risk Tool (SCART) which is there to enable NHS Boards to measure their level of compliance with a range of legal and best practice guidance and produce a prioritised high-level summary for consideration at Board level.

All submissions that have been provided on this matter have been to inform ongoing policy development and will not be published at this time.

I refer the member to the answer to question S5W-20424 on 18 December 2018. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at: http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx .

The Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 defines information as "recorded in any form”, so information held on any new form of communication developed since the introduction of the Act may be within the scope of a Freedom of Information request.

Scottish Government guidance is explicit that official information held in media including, but not limited to: email accounts, social media accounts (eg Facebook, Twitter), text messaging, mobile messaging (eg WhatsApp, Skype, Snapchat), cloud storage and collaboration tools, is subject to the Act.

Our guidance is available to view on an external sharepoint site that can be accessed from the Scottish Government FOI webpage: https://www.gov.scot/publications/freedom-of-information-document-collection/.