Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government's international offices are updated on all areas outlined in the Programme for Government including the constitution.

Since the emergence of the Omicron, the Scottish Government has undertaken a series of regular meetings with NHS Chief Executives to discuss contingency and resilience planning. These include meetings that were Chaired by the NHS Scotland Chief Executive and Chief Operating Officer as well as regular meetings between health and social care officials and NHS Scotland Chief Executives. The System Response Group meetings also include representations from wider stakeholder interests and Local Government.

I have held regular update meetings to discuss System Pressures to which all Boards are invited. I have also held meetings with COSLA and officials every Monday to receive updates on the Winter Package.

Finally, I held a number of meetings with specific Local Authorities, Health Boards and HSCPs on a one to one basis where the need arose.

These meeting dates are detailed in the following table:

Officials were informed that KPMG had withdrawn from bidding for UK government contracts on 17 December 2021.

The contract with KPMG to construct the business case for the National Care Service has not been suspended.

Following the procurement exercise the award decision was communicated to all bidders on 7 December 2021, with the contract being signed on 13 December 2021. It was subsequently published on the Public Contracts Scotland website on 10 January 2022.

The following table shows how many school-aged children are in each local authority (as at September 2020) and how many devices have been distributed by councils using the £25m digital inclusion funding made available by Scottish Government in 2020-21.

Local authorities across Scotland have a range of approaches to provision of technology in schools, including some councils who have undertaken to provide cohorts of their school population with devices using their own budgets. We do not hold information centrally on those approaches, therefore, the table below only shows devices distributed through the funding made available by Scottish Government in 2020-21.

In September 2021, the Scottish Government set out our approach and 16 commitments to improve care and support for people with long COVID in Scotland. Our approach is to ensure people have access to the support they need for assessment, diagnosis, care and rehabilitation in a setting as close to home as possible. Whilst long COVID clinics are one model NHS Boards may consider, we recognise that no one single approach is likely to fit all areas and circumstances.

It is for each NHS Board to develop and deliver the best models of care appropriate for their local population and that is why our Approach Paper underlines our commitment to making sure our NHS is resourced to respond innovatively to the needs of people with long COVID.

Our £10m Long COVID Support Fund will give NHS Boards additional resource to develop tailored approaches to best meeting the needs of people with long COVID in their local areas. This could include strengthening and improving the co-ordination of existing services, or establishing dedicated services (including ‘long COVID clinics’) if appropriate.

Key recommendations in the Heart Valve Voice report State of the Nation included:

1) collecting standardised data for HVD.

2) focus on HVD in campaigns to raise awareness of disease in women.

3) developing an optimal patient pathway for HVD.

4) improving access to echocardiography.

1) The Heart Disease Action Plan (2021) clearly sets out our priority for the effective use of high-quality, standardised data to support clinical decision-making, understand patient outcomes and enable better service-planning. In April 2021, we commissioned Public Health Scotland to develop the Scottish Cardiac Audit Programme. We have committed more than £1.5m over five years to support this transformative change in access to, and use of, data to drive improvement in cardiac services.

2) We have made clear commitments to tackling the inequalities faced by women with heart disease in our Women’s Health Plan, including the launch of an information campaign on women’s heart health. Future development of work in this area will be informed by the lived experience of women with heart disease.

3) Priority 2 within the Heart Disease Action Plan makes clear our commitment to developing nationally agreed pathways of care for all cardiac conditions. This work is underway.

4) We recognise the importance of improving access to echocardiography and are taking action to address this. Through the Heart Disease Action Plan funding call in 2021, we provided funding for a project exploring how to improve access to echocardiography.

The 2022-23 draft budget provides £42.2 million to provide universal free school lunches to all children in primaries 4, 5 and special schools to 5 during school term-time. This is in addition to the £53 million per year for universal provision for pupils in primary 1 to 3 which has been in place since 2015. The 2022-23 draft budget includes a £30 million capital allocation for initial investment in school kitchens ahead of roll-out of free lunches to all primary school children (P1-P7) later in the parliamentary term. We will continue to work with our partners in local authorities to plan for the further expansion of free school lunch provision over the next academic year.

The draft budget also provides £21.75 million to provide support to free school meals eligible families during the school holidays.

The Heart Disease Action Plan outlines our commitment to exploring innovative models of care for cardiac diagnosis. Through the Heart Disease Action Plan Funding call in 2021, we provided funding for a second NHS board to implement aspects of the OPERA study within its local service provision.

The learning from this will be fed into ongoing work by the Centre for Sustainable Delivery to better understand the opportunities for implementation of OPERA in other NHS Boards, through pathfinder work via the new Accelerated National Innovation Adoption pathway.