Chamber and committees

How Good Is Our School ? 4 has a strengthened focus on equality and wellbeing across the framework since mental, emotional, social and physical wellbeing has a significant impact on children and young people’s success in school and beyond school.

Quality indicator(QI) 3.1 Ensuring wellbeing, equality and inclusion focuses on the impact of the school’s approach to wellbeing which underpins children and young people’s ability to achieve success. It has a clear focus on ensuring wellbeing entitlements support all learners to maximise their successes and achievements. It has a strong focus on how well schools support mental health of children and young people.

Our priority is to make the most of two major commitments – the implementation of the Carers Act and ongoing reform of carer benefits, including the introduction of a new Young Carer Grant.

The Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 has established new rights for all carers in Scotland and takes a personalised approach to identifying individual’s needs for support. We are working to ensure that all carers, including young carers beyond the age of 16, are aware of their rights under the Act. To help us monitor the uptake of support under the Act we are running a Carers’ census data collection exercise. For more information on this please see the answer to S5W-24097 on 17 July 2019.

The Young Carer Grant, which can be applied for annually, will provide eligible young carers with a payment of £300 to help them access life opportunities that are the norm for many other young people. It will be paid from autumn 2019. We are developing a monitoring and evaluation framework to monitor the grant’s impact on the quality of young carers’ lives. We will continue to engage with carers and organisations, which will provide further opportunities to refine our monitoring approach. Scottish Ministers must also bring forward legislation to annually uprate by inflation the value of the grant and other carer’s assistance.

We have also committed to introduce free bus travel for recipients of the YCG during financial year 2020-21.

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 principal threat to water voles in Scotland comes from non-native American mink. For this reason, strategic mink control is generally considered to be the most effective means of helping Scottish water vole populations.

Various mink control measures have been put in place, for example during the Cairngorms Water Vole Conservation project (2007-2009), the Scottish Mink Initiative (2011–2015) and most recently through the current Scottish Invasive Species Initiative. All of these projects have been supported by Scottish Natural Heritage, both in terms of finance and staff resources.

The Trossachs Water Vole project, which is a partnership between Forestry and Land Scotland, Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park Authority and the Forth Rivers Trust, is helping water vole populations in the area to continue to expand through the monitoring of their population, creation of suitable wetland habitat and control of the numbers of American mink in the area.

As a result of these measures, water voles numbers are recovering in various locations across Scotland, including the Balmoral Estate on Deeside, Invermark, Glen Doll and Caenlochan National Nature Reserve and several other localities elsewhere in the north east of Scotland.

There are other expanding water vole populations in the Central Region that do not require any mink control. Forestry and Land Scotland work as a partner in the Seven Lochs Heritage Project, which has one of the main water vole populations at Easterhouse in Glasgow. The Project will focus on identifying, surveying and managing key water vole sites to better understand the distribution of riparian and fossorial (grassland) water vole populations in the Seven Lochs Project area. The project will also create areas of suitable high quality habitat and habitat networks, and work on education and raising awareness of water vole populations, their national significance and future conservation needs.

Service decisions are made by each local area and it would be for individual Alcohol and Drug Partnerships to provide this information.

Data on nurse endoscopists is not held by ISD within the ‘Clinical Nurse Specialty’ category.

Further information on ISD statistics, including information on how the data are collected and notes to aid interpretation, is given in the 'FAQs' section of the Workforce Statistics website at http://www.isdscotland.org/workforce/ .

The procurement of replacement GP IT systems commenced with publication of the European Single Procurement Document (ESPD) and Contract Notice in June 2017, was in advance of the publication of the Digital Health and Care Strategy (April 2018) in which the commitment to develop the National Digital Platform was first made. The tender documents did not require integration with the National Digital Platform at the point of initial delivery of the new systems, though suppliers were asked to confirm that their systems would have the ability to bi-directionally share data, which will be essential to future work to integrate these systems with the platform.

We note the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) have used a bed occupancy of 85% to estimate that NHS Scotland needs an additional 200 beds. For context, that is 1.5% of NHS Scotland’s acute bed base; RCEM also estimate that in England an additional 5,065 beds are needed - 5.0% of the general & acute bed base.

I understand that the 85% bed occupancy originates from research carried out around 20 years ago. There have been significant changes to the NHS and the way care is delivered since then, including the four hour A&E standard, ambulatory care, and same day surgery. We recognise that bed occupancy should be monitored as part of hospital bed planning. The latest published statistics show acute specialty bed occupancy in Scotland was at 87.7%, 86.9%, 85.9% and 86.7% in the last four years.

The Scottish Government is supporting Health and Social Care Partnerships to deliver more care in the community, and where possible at home, avoiding the need to go to hospital unnecessarily. This will allow hospitals to focus on the medical support that acute care can and should provide, and stays in hospital will be shorter. Alongside this we are working closely with health boards to support improved processes that will reduce the number of patients admitted to hospital that do not require admission and ensure that patients are discharged as soon as they are medically fit, avoiding unnecessary delays in hospital. As a result of this work, we have already delivered significant improvements in terms of reducing length of stay.

We will continue to engage in co-operative work with RCEM as we jointly seek to improve the delivery and effectiveness of our NHS.

Integration Authorities carry out an assessment of needs for supports and services – including adult social care support – as part of their strategic planning process. Authorities were required to have a plan in place for the delegation of functions to them and are required to review their strategic commissioning plan at least every three years, but may carry out additional or ongoing reviews.

The strategic planning process involves considering the specific characteristics and circumstances of their communities and available infrastructure, the overall needs of local service users and those of their overall population. Strategic plans should identify the total resources available across health and social care for each care group and for carers, and relate this information to the overall needs of local populations set out in the Joint Strategic Needs Assessment.

We meet regularly with all partnership areas to discuss their strategic plans and the progress they are making in addressing the needs of their local communities. We are planning to produce an overview report on the refreshed strategic plans later in this year which will pull out common themes and priorities.

The collectively-led national programme for reform of adult social care will consider the cost of social care support and how it is paid for. This will include consideration of the need for social care across Scotland, including unmet need, drawing on a range of sources, including our statistical publications on the provision of care homes and social care support services. The programme will consider how we can best support models of care to grow that are flexible and person-centred, to meet the rights and individual needs of people across Scotland into the future. It will also link with integrated workforce analysis and planning through the National Health and Social Care Workforce Plan.

I refer the member to the answer given to question S5W-24468 on 30 August 2019. 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