Chamber and committees

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde is leading the response to the HIV outbreak amongst people who inject drugs in Glasgow. This is an important issue; I take a keen interest in the response to this outbreak and note that a great deal of work is going into supporting this vulnerable group.

We are providing £2.13m over three years to third sector organisations to support innovative work to tackle poor sexual health and reduce blood borne virus transmissions. This includes funding for Scottish Drugs Forum to work with people who inject drugs to help them reduce risk behaviours connected with HIV and other sexually transmitted infections.

I note that the research referred to examined the causes of the outbreak of HIV amongst people who inject drugs in Glasgow, which was identified in 2015. It was the product of collaboration between Glasgow Caledonian University, Health Protection Scotland, and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. Scottish Government officials have well-established working relationships with several authors of the paper, including colleagues from each of the above organisations.

I visited the Brownlee clinic, which is leading the medical response to this outbreak, in November 2018 and visited Waverley Care’s street support team, which works to provide treatment support and testing, in July 2019.

The number of needles distributed to drugs users in Glasgow in; (a) 2015-16 can be found at
https://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Drugs-and-Alcohol-Misuse/Publications/2017-06-13/2017-06-13-IEP-Report.pdf ;

(b) 2016-17 can be found at
https://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Drugs-and-Alcohol-Misuse/Publications/2018-08-07/2018-08-07-IEP-Report.pdf .

The data for 2017-18 and 2018-19 will be published by Information Services Division in due course.

The Scottish Government is taking a number of measures to ensure Scottish domiciled students from all sectors of society can access medical courses. By 2021 overall medical undergraduate numbers will have increased by 190 places (or 22%) over 2016 levels. This includes, since 2016, 50 ring-fenced widening access places focused on SIMD 20 applicants. For the 2019-20 intake, we have set a new target for Scottish domiciled and the rest of EU medical students in line with Scottish Government guidance to increase retention of medical students, replacing 100 rest of UK medical students with 100 Scottish domiciled/EU students on a phased basis over the next three years. We have also increased the number of students on our targeted pre-medical entry courses from 40 to 50, focused on socially disadvantaged as well as remote & rural applicants, and continue to fund our Scottish Graduate Entry (ScotGEM) programme which includes a return of service bursary.

I refer the member to Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) Bib number: 60845

The current Early Learning and Childcare (ELC) census is collected annually from centres delivering funded ELC in September. It was designed to capture the number of funded registrations with ELC providers, along with some additional breakdowns such as stage and additional support needs. The methodology makes it difficult to capture more detailed information at an aggregate level, such as ethnicity, without encountering quality issues and placing a significant burden of collection on providers.

It has been recognised for some time that the current ELC census is not sufficient to provide the information necessary to manage this growing sector, and so since 2015 we have been carrying out a development project to transform the ELC census to an individual level child census. The new census process will be based on extractions of data from management information systems, and will collect more information on the characteristics of children registered for funded ELC, including ethnicity. Data from the new census will be available in 2021.

The Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan is backed by the £50 million Tackling Child Poverty Fund, as announced in Programme for Government 2017-18. Current investment is set out within the first annual progress report published in June 2019.

The Fund is supporting innovative projects to tackle and reduce levels of child poverty in Scotland so minority ethnic households will benefit from all of the programmes supported from the Fund.

In addition, we have outlined that the Fund will invest £500,000 (2020-22) to work directly with Gypsy/Traveller families and other partners on our community education programme.

The Scottish Government is already taking substantive steps to support families from before birth through the critical early years of a child’s life.

We published our Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan – Year One Progress Report on 26 June which sets out actions we have taken over the past year to tackle child poverty. In this report we set out the support Scottish Government provides to children and families through the course of their lives.

This includes: the Universal Health Visiting Pathway; Best Start Grant payments, Best Start Food payments from August 2019; and the doubling of Early Learning and Childcare to 1140 hours.

Moreover the recently announced Scottish Child Payment will provide further support of £10 per week, per child with no limit on the number of children families can receive support for. The benefit will be fully rolled out by 2022, with early-rollout available in 2021 for children under six. The benefit will mean that a family with two children will be more than £1000 better off each year.

All of these actions are taken as part of a wider, direct, investment of roughly £527 million specifically targeted at low income families with children, which does not include the universal investment which supports all families with children in Scotland.

Health Scotland has responsibility for producing public facing vaccination communications and are part of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) global Vaccine Safety Network. The Scottish national immunisation website is WHO accredited with expert reviewed content containing easily discoverable information that educates and reassures.

Further, Health Scotland is working with NHS Education Scotland to develop advice and guidance on vaccine hesitancy for staff delivering vaccines.

The four devolved nations meet regularly to discuss vaccination and there is collective support for a WHO accredited approach to public communications.

We recognise the impact vaccine hesitancy can have on global health and therefore the importance of ensuring every effort is made to promote and encourage uptake of vaccinations. Vaccine uptake rates in Scotland remain high, however, we are not complacent about this.

Health Scotland is part of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) global Vaccine Safety Network. Public facing communications, including a WHO accredited website, support our vaccination programmes and aim to encourage uptake by providing people with reliable vaccine safety information that educates and reassures.