Chamber and committees

The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing wrote to Chairs and Chief Executives of NHS boards on 22 February 2013 to stress his expectation that confidentiality clauses and non-derogatory statement clauses are not used to suppress the reporting of concerns in the NHS in Scotland and to ensure that these clauses are used appropriately.

The revised confidentiality clause for NHSScotland compromise agreements was finalised earlier this year.

The revised clause provides a style of wording that will be routinely proposed for incorporation into any NHSScotland compromise agreement. A copy of this revised style of wording will be placed in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre for information.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information. This is an issue between individual NHS boards and their employees.

The Scottish Government has no plans to place copies of correspondence with UK Ministers in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre.

Information Services Division (ISD) publish NHS Workforce data on a quarterly bases, with the most recent publication date being 31 March 2013. Information as at April 2013 is therefore not available.

Information on how many whole time equivalent staff were employed at the Vale of Leven Hospital broken down by job family as at 31 March 2012 and 31 March 2013 is shown in the following table.

Source-ISD Scotland

This is a matter for individual health boards. The information sought is not held centrally by the Scottish Government.

Information is not available in the format requested. Information that is available has only been centrally recorded until 2009, and is not recorded by health board as the trainees rotate between health boards as part of their individual programme placements. Currently, there are 804 programme placements in Foundation Years 1 and 2 in Scotland.

Foundation trainees may not complete their programme placements for a variety of reasons, for example illness, maternity leave, resignation, dismissal, remedial training required etc. The numbers of those who did not complete their Foundation programmes since 2009 are shown in the following table.

Of the number failing to complete a given year of training, some will return to training i.e. after maternity leave or ill health, and subsequently complete their training. The figure in parentheses is the number who resigned or were dismissed.

Information is not available in the format requested. Applications to Foundation training programmes are co-ordinated on a UK-wide basis through the UK Foundation Programme Office. Applicants are required to rank all 21 UK Foundation Schools in order of preference and, following an assessment and scoring process, applicants are matched to a Foundation School taking into consideration their preference. At this point, the Scotland Foundation School is then allocated the right number of applicants for the number of programmes available in any year. There then follows a further process that enables applicants to rank their preferences for a cluster of Foundation programmes which, ultimately, leads to applicants being matched to their individual programmes.

The following table indicates the number of Foundation programme places available in Scotland from 2007. All programme places were filled.

This information is not held centrally.

Information on the number of transvaginal meshes purchased by NHS Boards is not held centrally and is for those NHS Boards to manage.

In addition, I refer the member to the answer to: question S4W-14315 on 30 April 2013; and questions S4W-14626 and S4W-14627 on 17 May 2013. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at:

http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx.