Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government's approach to healthcare has for a number years prioritised a preventative approach, recognising the wide range of benefits this can provide. This has been supported by broader initiatives that take a whole-system approach, for example through Scotland's world-leading approach to ill-health prevention policies on reducing smoking and alcohol consumption.

A preventative approach will underpin the National Care Service (NCS), which the Scottish Government is committed to introducing by the end of this Parliament to end the postcode lottery of care provision, ensuring quality, fairness and consistency of provision that meets individuals’ needs, regardless of where they live in Scotland.

The Scottish Government recognises that change cannot wait until the NCS is in place, and we have established a number of programmes across the Health and Social Care portfolio which will further embed a preventative approach. The Preventative and Proactive Care programme will help develop preventative healthcare models, and will support the delivery of many of the recommendations made in the Independent Review of Adult Social Care, which highlighted the need for a greater preventative approach. A range of pathfinders are being considered to test potential models in various settings.

The Place and Wellbeing Programme has a primary focus on preventative local action in partnership with communities and how we – as the system – can support that. This will bolster local cross-sector partnerships with evidence, data, intelligence and the right policy context and funding so they can together address the root causes of health inequalities in their area. We are also working to better integrate community-led Third Sector provision of health improvement activity within local health and social delivery across Scotland. This will make it easier for individuals to reach preventative and early intervention support in their community.

A fundamental shift in how the NHS and the NCS contribute to community wealth will widen access to fair work in the sector with accelerated routes into these jobs for those furthest from the job market. Alongside actions to enable partnership working and local leadership, the Scottish Government will support health and social care providers to be active anchor institutions and build wealth in their community. This will mitigate against some of the drivers of poor health and health inequalities, such as unemployment.

The regulations for foods for special medical purposes are one of the categories covered by the foods for specific groups legislation. Retained Regulation (EU) No 609/2013 on Foods for Specific Groups replaced the former Foods for Particular Nutritional Uses approach and begun a new EU phased process to review and update the composition and labelling for each category. As part of this process, Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2016/128 was introduced and has applied to businesses since 2019.

This, now retained Regulation, lays out the compositional, labelling and notification requirements of foods for special medical purposes. These foods are a category of Foods for Specific Groups , specially processed or formulated and intended for the dietary management of patients and to be used under medical supervision.

These foods are intended for the exclusive or partial feeding of patients with a limited, impaired or disturbed capacity to take, digest, absorb, metabolise or excrete ordinary foodstuffs or certain nutrients contained therein or metabolites. They are also intended for use by patients with other medically-determined nutrient requirements, whose dietary management cannot be achieved only by modification of the normal diet, by other foods for particular nutritional uses, or by a combination of the two.

The powers to enforce the requirements in Scotland are contained within The Foods for Specific Groups (Scotland) Regulations 2016 (as amended).

We engage with the UK Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) on a range of issues.

We are not working with DHSC on this particular matter.

We are committed to being open and transparent about data on waiting times performance, including against the Clinical Prioritisation Framework, that was developed to provide guidance to all NHS Boards around prioritising their planned care waiting lists throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data that is published on Waiting Times performance is subject to continual review, development and quality assurance by PHS, the holders of this data.

PHS plans to publish statistics on Clinical Prioritisation for the first time early September 2022, this will be specific to patients waiting for treatment as an inpatient or day case who are covered by the Treatment Time Guarantee.

PHS, with support from the Scottish Government, will continue to work with NHS Boards to improve the completeness and quality of the data to ensure the data is sufficiently robust to be released as official statistics on the scheduled date.

We introduced temporary Special Leave measures at the beginning of the pandemic to support our NHS colleagues and help the service manage infection levels.

Since March 2020, NHS Staff who have been absent due to COVID have been paid in full as if they had been at work.

Prior to any changes made in the future as we move towards living with Covid, we will engage with both NHS Scotland Employers and Staff Side representatives to ensure an effective and smooth transition back to standard Sickness Absence terms and conditions .

The Scottish Government continues to work hard to bring in new workforce capacity across NHS services. This is why we announced our commitment to recruit an additional 1,000 health and care support staff by 31 March and provided up to £15 million in funding to take forward that recruitment.

I am delighted to announce that following a period of intense recruitment activity by our health boards, we have welcomed over a thousand additional Agenda for Change bands 2 to 4 staff.

This additional influx of staff will provide longer term improvement in service capacity across our health and social care systems as we continue to recover from the pandemic and provides them with an opportunity to develop a career in health and social care.

The report has not been shared with the Scottish Government, but children and young people living in this type of accommodation should receive the highest level and quality of care.

Officials have contacted the City of Edinburgh Council to offer support. We are assured that the findings and recommendations of the report are now being taken forward as part of a robust and detailed action plan to improve the quality of care.

For reference details of the 9 projects are available from the Chief Scientist Office website

Long Covid Call – Chief Scientist Office (scot.nhs.uk)

Six-month progress reports have been received for all 9 projects

A twelve-month progress report has been received for project LTE/20/04

On 31 March 2022 the Chief Scientist Office hosted a virtual symposium where the lead investigators for each of the 9 projects presented the results obtained to date