Chamber and committees

The new Social Security Scotland service will provide people with the information and advice they need for the benefits it will be responsible for. This includes staff being available locally to meet with people and help them complete their applications and provide advice on their payments. These staff will have a presence in every local authority area and work in existing premises and alongside colleagues in health and social care services including links workers, local authorities and the third sector. This will help free up the time of professionals, such as clinical and non-clinical staff, who are involved in helping patients with welfare related issues to concentrate on supporting people in their capacity of medical experts.

The GP Contract accounts increases the role of the multidisciplinary team in and around GP Practices in order to free up GPs to spend more time with patients who need their skills most. It is supported by a Memorandum of Understanding between the Scottish Government, the BMA, Health Boards and Integrated Authorities. This sets out the principles and priorities for services to be locally redesigned where it is safe, sustainable and improves care for patients to do so. Services for priority delivery over the next three years includes providing community links workers to support GP practices or groups of practices. Health Boards and Integrated authorities are developing Primary Care Improvement Plans that will set out how Integration Authorities will deliver these services locally.

The new GP contract, backed by investment of £110 million in 2018-19 and jointly developed with the BMA, will help cut doctors’ workload and ensure GPs are able to spend more time with patients most in need of their skills. This will be achieved by supporting Health Boards, Integrated Authorities and GPs to work together to redesign services so that the wider primary care multi-disciplinary team take on services previously carried out by GPs where it is safe, sustainable, and improves to patient care to do so.

Services to be delivered as a priority include providing community Links workers to patients in GP practices or clusters of practices, who will help with signposting to services; assessment and personal planning; and supporting people to take up services in other organisations.

The GP Contract is supported by a Memorandum of Understanding between the Scottish Government, the BMA, Health Boards and Integrated Authorities, which sets out the principles and priorities of how services will be redesigned locally to deliver the priorities of the new GMS contract over the next three years. While the focus for Links workers remains on the areas of greatest deprivation, we also aim to meet the needs of those who have complex conditions and rural communities by supporting Integration Authorities to develop these services locally, over the course of the next three years.

I have portfolio responsibility for this work.

Costings will be considered as part of our on-going work on the design and delivery of the roll-out of this service.

We have committed to begin roll out of the financial health check to low income families in 2018. There are currently 140,000 families with children in relative poverty who would be eligible for a financial health check and uptake of this service will be closely monitored once launched.

Scottish Government Officials are in regular contact with NHS Lanarkshire, as with all Health Boards, on out of hours issues through a variety of channels, e.g. through attendance at the National Out of Hours Operations Group or when gathering information on OOH cover over the Festive and Easter period or in response to specific intelligence. With regard to this specific issue we have liaised with NHS Lanarkshire who have provided reassurance that when OOH services have been forced to close the Airdrie site and operate from the Douglas St Clinic in Hamilton, they have managed to cope with demand, and where necessary provide additional transport for those patients who have difficulty getting to Hamilton.

As outlined in Every Child, Every Chance: The Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, we will begin roll-out of a financial health check for families on low income in 2018. We are currently considering options for the design and delivery of this work alongside how to build on the pilot financial health check service for older people delivered in November 2017.

We commissioned Citizens Advice Scotland (CAS) to run a pilot Financial Health Check service for older people throughout November 2017. Fourteen bureaux took part across Scotland and undertook a range of different activities to attract interest in and then deliver the Financial Health Check over the month-long period. The evaluation of the pilots carried out by CAS showed a good level of financial gain for many older people who used the service.

Further, our Every Child, Every Chance: Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan contains a specific commitment to launch a Financial Health Check Guarantee for low income families with children. This programme will begin rollout in 2018, based on learning from the CAS evaluation.

The latest official data for Out of Hours Primary Care Services in Scotland was published by ISD on 27 February 2018. Whilst the Healthcare Improvement Scotland Quality Indicators for primary care out-of-hours services do not permit this level of detail to be assessed.

This is an operational matter for NHS Lanarkshire.