Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government has taken steps to increase staff vaccination. The Chief Medical Officer, Chief Nursing Officer and Chief Pharmaceutical Officer wrote out to the NHS in September last year re-iterating the importance of the flu vaccine to staff, especially for those directly involved in patient care.

We have made clear to the NHS that free seasonal flu vaccination should be offered by NHS organisations, including primary care employers, to all employees directly involved in delivering care. We have instructed NHS Boards that every effort should be made to promote and offer the vaccine in a way that is accessible to all staff regardless of location and working pattern. NHS Boards across Scotland have worked hard to do this by taking innovative approaches to making vaccine available, promoting it to staff, and in providing leadership through senior clinicians and managers.

We have also supported NHS Boards with national resources, including a flu vaccine promotional resource toolkit for use by those with a role in supporting staff health and wellbeing. The toolkit focuses on maximising participation and helps those charged with promoting and delivering the flu vaccine to staff to plan their local flu campaign.

We will consider what more can be done to increase uptake among NHS staff for next flu season.

The Scottish Government acknowledges that motivations are an important aspect of drinking behaviour. The Drinkaware research report (https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/media/1852/drinking-to-cope-jan-2018.pdf) referred to in the question specifically focussed on adults in the UK who drink for coping reasons. The wider report (https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/research/our-research-and-evaluation-reports/drinkaware-monitor-2017/ ) found that the most common motivations overall for drinking alcohol are social with 84% of those of those who drink alcohol in the UK doing so at least some of the time for this reason.

The Scottish Government takes a whole population approach to reducing alcohol-related harm recognising that alcohol misuse can affect all sectors of the population. Our Alcohol Framework, published in 2009, contains over 40 measures and actions to tackle alcohol misuse. The implementation of minimum unit pricing on 1 May 2018 will address the cheap, high strength alcohol that does so much damage to our communities. We will be refreshing our Alcohol Framework this year, providing opportunity to further consider the additional actions and steps needed to tackle alcohol-related harm in Scotland.

The Scottish Government’s Mental Health Strategy 2017-27 – a 10 year vision (http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2017/03/1750/0), published in March 2017, recognises that mental health issues commonly co-exist with problem substance use (alcohol and drugs). The Strategy highlights that Integration Authorities will wish to ensure that alcohol, drugs, mental health services and social services work jointly and in a holistic way, so that people receive help with substance misuse and any underlying mental health issues. The Scottish Government provides NHS24 with £825,000 per annum to run Breathing Space (a confidential phone line for anyone in Scotland feeling low, anxious or depressed) and £200,000 per annum to run NHS Living Life (a phone and computer based psychological therapy service).

The number of school leavers in a Modern Apprenticeship (full-time or part-time) 9 months after leaving school was (a) 4,759 (2014-15 school leavers cohort) and (b) 5,240 (2015-16 school leavers cohort).

The data available does not state if a school leaver is in a full-time or part-time modern apprenticeship, only that their destination is a modern apprenticeship.

The data for the 2016-17 school leaver cohort is currently not held centrally.

A range of actions are underway to develop a high quality, diverse workforce to meet the needs of expanded Early Learning and Childcare (ELC).

Most prominently, we launched phase one of our recruitment campaign in October 2017, encouraging school leavers to pursue training and employment opportunities. The campaign will continue to run over the coming years to raise awareness of the opportunities available.

The Skills Investment Plan (SIP) for the ELC sector was published on the 12^th January 2018. It was created by partner organisations from the sector and identifies the challenges and opportunities presented by recruiting additional ELC staff as well as some of the joint working required to meet our recruitment targets. For example, a range of partner organisations are developing clearly articulated career pathways in to, and within, the sector to demonstrate the wide range of roles and training methods offered by the sector.

We have already increased the provision of training opportunities in colleges and universities in 2017-18 and will further increase in 2018-19 to support the next phase of the workforce expansion. We are also increasing the number of modern apprenticeships for the sector by 10% year on year and the contribution rates for those apprenticeships has been increased to encourage employers and businesses to help meet recruitment demands.

We will continue to work collaboratively with delivery partners in the coming years to ensure the workforce requirements of expanded ELC are met.

Two class 385 trains concluded the required testing on the newly electrified Edinburgh-Glasgow via Falkirk route prior to Christmas and the data from these dynamic tests will form part of a suite of documentation submitted in February to gain approval from the Office of Road and Rail to operate the new fleet in passenger service in the coming months on services between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Hitachi has reported delays to the manufacture process but are working hard to address this. Class 385s are now starting to arrive in Scotland to help support the on-going driver training and staff familiarisation programme ahead of gradual service introduction of the new longer, faster, greener fleet onto Edinburgh - North Berwick/Dunbar services during the second half of 2018.

Six car peak operation on the North Berwick route using existing Class 380s has already been introduced, 10 months ahead of schedule, and further improvements to capacity will be delivered by the end of this year.

This information is not held centrally.

Mandatory food and nutrition standards apply to all food served in Scottish schools but does not cover any food brought from home. Our Better Eating, Better Learning guidance continues to support schools and local authorities to improve school food and food education.

The Scottish Government does not collect information on secondary school class sizes.

Education Scotland has provided an extensive range of support for Curriculum for Excellence, including Developing the Young Workforce and the Scottish Attainment Challenge. We believe that the changes to the way Education Scotland works – part of the wider package of reforms around the Regional Improvement Collaboratives – will continue to ensure the right support is available to teachers and schools across the country.

As announced in the Draft Budget on 14 December 2017, the health resource budget will increase by over £400 million to £13.1 billion in 2018-19. We have prioritised investment in frontline services, and total additional funding for our frontline NHS Boards will amount to £354 million. This is part of our commitment to deliver an increase in the NHS revenue budget of £2 billion by the end of this parliament.

These increases have only been made possible, without impacting on other public services, through the progressive tax policies set out in the Draft Budget. Our estimate is that Conservative tax policies would have resulted in a reduction in the Scottish Government’s resource budget of £501 million in 2018-19, meaning less funding for the NHS.

The additional funding set out in the Draft Budget is provided as part of our twin approach of investment and reform, recognising the increasing demand and expectations placed upon our frontline services and being clear that the status quo is not an option. As set out in our response to S5W-12317 on 20 November 2017, we published the Health & Social Care Delivery Plan in December 2016 which sets out an ambitious programme of change to deliver better health, better care and better value, and to ensure our services are sustainable. As part of the Delivery Plan, we are working to develop a medium term financial framework, within the context of the budget settlement that the Scottish Government receives.

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 Scottish Government has invested record levels of additional funding this year of £22.4 million to support unscheduled care and winter pressures. Despite the recent winter pressures impacting on A&E departments, Scotland’s performance for the year to November 2017 was 93.8%; core A&E departments continue to be the best performing in UK for more than two and a half years.

We have worked closely with our partners to support the development of winter planning and had the opportunity to see the plans and offer comment on these where. It is important to highlight that Scotland has gone into the winter in a strong position as a result of the planning, the work we have done with our emergency departments through our improvement programme and through health and social care integration, which ultimately leads to positive outcomes for patients.

We will, as in previous years, commence a routine review of winter, and in addition to this we will work with the local teams through our improvement work to identify what worked and what worked less well during these last few weeks so that we can learn lessons from this and ensure that this learning is fully captured in future planning.