Chamber and committees

NHS Lothian will be taking over Deans and Eliburn Medical Practice from 1 April 2017 and will ensure that patients continue to receive a high standard of care.

NHS boards have various means of supporting independently contracted practices which request assistance. We expect Health boards to work with practices as constructively and as flexibly as is appropriate to ensure that all patients have access to GP services. The Scottish Government is aware of concerns around recruitment issues in Lothian and elsewhere in Scotland, these will be taken into account as the 2017 GMS contract negotiations go forward.

In 2017-18 we will invest £72 million in the Primary Care Fund to improve primary care and GP services. As part of this, £5 million will be invested in work to explore with key stakeholders the issues surrounding GP recruitment and retention. This is the first step to increase spending on Community Health Services by £500 million by 2021-22 so that it is at least £1,283 million. This commitment will mean that by 2021-22, for the first time, more than half of the NHS frontline spending will be in our Community Health Service.

This information is not routinely collected.

Hepatitis C test data is only held centrally for prisons within NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Grampian, Lothian and Tayside board areas.

In the calendar year 2015 2,396 prisoners in these Board areas were tested for Hepatitis C. In the same year 137 individuals were diagnosed with Hepatitis C in a prison in those areas. Data for 2016 is not yet available.

The following number of practices were closed to new patient registrations in each NHS board:

Circumstances will arise where a practice experiences capacity issues and is unable to routinely accept new patients onto its list. We expect Health boards to work with practices as constructively and as flexibly as is appropriate to help manage the situation and ensure that all patients have access to GP services.

We expect that every NHS Scotland patient who needs it has access to Proton Beam Therapy (PBT). PBT is highly specialised and available in only a few treatment centres globally. There are currently no NHS PBT centres in the UK and Scottish patients go to other European countries or the USA for PBT. Costs are covered by central NHS funding. Treatment referrals are agreed by a Scottish expert panel and subsequently by a UK panel. More information can be found from: https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/spec-services/highly-spec-services/pbt/.

Data on care hours provided by local authorities is published by the Scottish Government at: http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Health/Data/HomeCare/SocialCareDatasets.

The Scottish Government does not set targets for local authorities' delivery of care hours.

This information is not held centrally, individual local authorities are responsible for collating the data in their area.

More equitable access to modern radiotherapy is one of the ambitions of our cancer strategy, Beating Cancer: Ambition and Action, published last year. Currently all Scottish radiotherapy departments have state-of-the-art linear accelerators and associated equipment capable of delivering the most up-to-date and technically complex treatments. £60 million has been invested in updating radiotherapy equipment in the four years to 2014-15. The cancer strategy pledges to invest further £50 million in radiotherapy equipment and relevant training and staff across NHS Scotland to meet projected demands over the next 10 to 15 years.

The feasibility study is being conducted by Scottish Government officials, working with analysts and economists to produce a reliable estimate of the costs involved in extending free personal care to all adults.

The feasibility study will also look at:

The interaction with the wider policy environment, including the relationship with social security;

Financial benefits and constraints;

The administration costs of charging for social care; and

Will seek to clarify or enhance data provided by Councils through the Local Financial Returns.

The feasibility study will be completed in summer 2017.

We have provided significant resource to enable the Living Wage to be paid to care workers supporting adults. This focus has been to recognise challenges facing the sector in regards to recruitment and retention and to improve quality of care.

We wish to see everyone in Scotland be paid at least the Living Wage and we encourage local partners and providers to expand on this initiative to include other groups of workers where this is regarded as affordable and sustainable and meets local priorities.