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The Scottish Government has a long-standing commitment to the principles of Fair-Work for the social care sector as we recognise and value the work that they do.

The £12 minimum pay-rate from April 2024 for Adult Social Care workers represents a 14.3% increase for these workers in the last two years; with pay rising from at least £10.50 per hour in April 2022.

We have continued to progress a number of key projects to take forward and improve Fair Work principles, which will not only improve the current experience of the workforce, but also help to attract and retain new staff into the workforce.

We will also continue to build a National Care Service that has Fair Work, Ethical Commissioning and Sectoral Bargaining at its heart.

In developing the actions within Scotland’s National Innovation Strategy, including our Innovation Funding Review, we engaged extensively with a diverse and extensive range of institutions, organisations and stakeholders from across the innovation ecosystem.

This included a public consultation, events, workshops and engagements with businesses from a range of different sectors and sizes across the country, industry leadership groups, all of our universities and colleges, our innovation centres, investors, entrepreneurs and the wider public sector including our enterprise and skills agencies.

As we further develop the Innovation Funding Review we will continue to utilise this evidence-led, open, inclusive and collaborative approach to ensure we meet the needs of our diverse innovation community.

The information requested is not held centrally.

NHS National Services Scotland has commissioned NHS Lothian to develop a National Learning Disability Child and Adolescent Mental Health Inpatient Unit. This Unit is currently in the planning stages. As part of the development of this service, we have established a National Learning Disability Consultation Service for mental health teams responsible for the care of young people with intellectual disability, which aims to support local CAMHS teams to manage young people’s care safely in the community.

In the small number of instances where a young person with a learning disability and mental health condition requires admission to a mental health inpatient unit, they would be admitted to an adolescent inpatient unit in England, via the cross-border transfer process.

Published figures on the most recent and historical numbers of patients that have been admitted to hospital can be found within the within the Annual Acute Activity publication, which was published on 26 September 2023 by Public Health Scotland. The publication can be found below:

Acute hospital activity and NHS beds information (annual) - Annual – year ending 31 March 2023 - Acute hospital activity and NHS beds information (annual) - Publications - Public Health Scotland

Published data is only available for a ten year period, from financial year 2013-14 to financial year 2022-23, and is only available at a Scotland level. Data on patient activity is presented in Table 2 – inpatient and day case activity, and the measure of interest can be found by selecting the NHS board of residence in the indicator drop down and either stays, episodes or patients within the measure drop down. Figures where ‘no fixed abode’ will then be listed in the table.

Menopause care and support is a top priority in the Women’s Health Plan . Progress against the menopause actions can be found in our Women’s Health Plan: Report on Progress and Interim Progress Update 2023 .

Since the publication of the Interim Progress Update, the development of a menopause public health campaign has begun and this is planned at present to be delivered within the current financial year. We are also continuing to promote menopause information on the NHS Inform Women’s Health Platform, and in October 2023 we held a ‘Talk Menopause’ panel session with The Alliance to raise women’s awareness of the menopause and menopause symptoms.

The NHSScotland Menopause and Menstrual Health Policy was launched on 31 October 2023. Whilst the policy was written specifically for NHS Scotland, the supporting resources, including line managers’ guidance and workplace adjustment guidance, are intended for use more widely and are available on the National Wellbeing Hub .

A table showing the number of supported living projects and the number of homes delivered in each local authority area since 1999, which received support from the Affordable Housing Supply Programme or its predecessor programmes, has been placed in the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib Number 64694).

We have interpreted ‘supported accommodation’ as including sheltered, very sheltered and supported accommodation and homes delivered for people with dementia.

We do not hold information on supported living developments where we did not provide funding.

To note that here have been a number of IT system changes and coding changes since 1999.

Work is ongoing with NHS Boards and Health and Social Care Partnerships to identify the greatest opportunities in terms of increasing Hospital at Home capacity to ease system pressures and improve patient care over winter. We have notified the majority of Boards and partners of investment

The Crown Office & Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) proactively notifies victims of decisions not to prosecute in all solemn cases and all summary cases within the specified case remit of the COPFS Victim Information and Advice (VIA) service, including Domestic Abuse and Hate Crime. COPFS proactively notifies victims of decisions to discontinue prosecutions in all categories of cases. COPFS advises all victims of all decisions not to prosecute on request.

COPFS is actively exploring possible approaches to extending the current notification scheme to all relevant summary cases.

The Scottish Government is committed to supporting children and adults who have deafness, sight loss and dual sensory loss to access the support and social care they need through its See Hear Strategy, published in 2014.

The Scottish Government provides Section 10 funding for Deafblind Scotland’s BSL Café Project. This project supports people who are at risk of a second sensory loss to acquire further communication skills by teaching them BSL. We will encourage Deafblind Scotland to share the learning from this project.

A refreshed See Hear Strategy is due to be published in February 2025 and will incorporate the views of people with lived experience. Communication will of course be an important theme of the new See Hear strategy. An action on encouraging learning BSL as a second language will be included in the first draft of the strategy, to be considered by stakeholders.

Scottish Ministers have allocated almost £6.2M of funding since 2014 to support the local implementation of the Strategy and help drive progress.

The Scottish Government recognises the challenges facing those living in remote and rural areas and the importance of women being able to access the support they need, when they need it. Work is ongoing to ensure services are developed in a flexible and innovative way, recognising local population needs and geographic challenges and there is now a menopause specialist in every mainland NHS Board, with a buddy system in place for the Island Boards.