Chamber and committees

There has been an improvement in the performance in response to GPs' urgent calls. These calls mostly concern the admission of patients to hospital following a doctor's home visit. Here the service aim to transfer 95% of such requests to hospital within 15 minutes of the time agreed with the doctor, which might typically be two or three hours from the time the request is made. In Angus the service is currently transferring 90.7% of such cases to hospital within 15 minutes - an improvement of 2% on the previous reporting period.

An additional seven front line emergency ambulance staff are now operational in the Angus area and there are another two vacancies waiting to be filled. All the ambulance stations in the area are now operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A paramedic-led thrombolytic service has been introduced to reduce the "pain to needle" time for cardiac patients who require thrombolysis. There are also plans to introduce some dedicated "GPs' urgent" resources in the near future.

No specific instructions have been given to the Enterprise Networks with respect to providing opportunities for the development of refrigerator decommissioning industries. Decommissioning firms will be attracted by the clear market opportunity and I would expect the Enterprise Networks to provide advice and guidance to any such companies as part of their strategic remit to develop business and in ways consistent with the principles of sustainable development.

Demand levels and response times across the East Central Ambulance Division, which covers the Angus area, are reported twice daily. This in turn supports weekly monitoring information that is used for performance management purposes by officers from ambulance station level through to divisional managers, national headquarters and the health department.

In order to inform its consideration of the fridges issue, on 6 December 2001 the Executive advised local authorities of the volumes of discarded fridges and freezers expected to arise in their area and asked whether their plans for dealing with such waste could cope with those volumes. The response provided the basis for the local authority grant announced in the answer given to question S1W-23475 on 7 March 2002.In other respects, each local authority is responsible for ensuring the safe disposal of the wastes it collects and the Executive does not collate information on how authorities have been dealing with discarded fridges and freezers.

The Tayside NHS Board and the Scottish Ambulance Service agreed that for modern, safe and responsive patient services to be sustained in Angus then investment in additional emergency ambulance service resources was required. That investment has been and is continuing to be made into the area.

An on-going national audit of hip fracture patients, provides regular feed back to participating centres and to annual professional meetings. An annual report is to be published within the next two months. This will be linked with the evidence based SIGN Guideline on the prevention and management of hip fracture in older people which was published in January 2002.CRAG Clinical Outcome Indicators will be published in May 2002. These will include survival rates for 30 days and for 120 days after admission for hip fracture for every trust in Scotland (as defined before reorganisation on 1 April 1999). Complete trend data for every year from 1991 to 2000 will be presented.The Scottish Trauma Audit Group (STAG) also collects data on all major trauma cases including orthopaedic trauma. This is fed back to local teams, but is not published.There are no national audits into the provision of orthopaedic services, but the Clinical Standards Board for Scotland (CSBS) has accepted that the management of fractured hip is a tracer condition for the provision of acute services to older people. CSBS will be monitoring all Scottish acute services for older people later this year and will publish their report in 2003.

As at 11 April, under the 2000-06 FIFG programmes, £4.95 million has been awarded to 52 projects in the Highlands and Islands Transitional Objective 1 area and £4.52 million to 44 projects in the rest of Scotland. Details of individual awards are set out in the Executive's press releases SE 1743/2001 of 24 July 2001 and SE 5285/2002 of 4 February 2002, which can be viewed on the Executive's website.

The £18 million available to fish processors, is distributed through the FIFG Lowland Scotland Processing and Marketing Scheme, under a six-year programme ending in 2006. Processors can apply at any time, and awards are made on a quarterly basis through a competitive selection procedure.Applications receive priority if they add value in Scotland to primary produce, involve products designed for the export market, result in an increase or safeguarding of employment or demonstrate increased returns to the catching/fish farming sector.To date 39 applications have been awarded FIFG grant of £3.8 million plus SEERAD support grant of £1.3 million. These awards are expected to generate investment of more than £26 million and lead to the creation of 900 jobs.

Collating information on the number of redundant fridges and freezers held in storage at any given time does not help to manage the problem, and asking local authority personnel to supply information which changes by the day merely diverts their attention from doing so effectively.What is important is knowing the scale of the problem and ensuring that local authorities have the financial support they need to deal with it. The Executive's research has identified the number of waste fridges arising in Scotland and we have been able to model those numbers against local authority area. It is planning tools of this nature which local authorities and the waste management industry need. Having quantified the scale of the problem in this way, and having consulted local authorities on their likely costs, we were then able to provide them with an appropriate level of financial assistance.