Seòmar agus comataidhean

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-04202 on 25 November 2021. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers .

Decisions on local staffing requirements and recruitment are the responsibility of individual NHS Boards. However, Scottish Government officials are continually engaging with NHS Boards to identify particular areas of concern.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde are delivering a number of campaigns to fill vacancies and to recruit additional staffing. The Board are recruiting 222 Band 3 Health Care Support Workers (HCSW) to their Health and Social Care Partnerships and are targeting the recruitment of a further 200 HCSWs into Acute settings, as well as 20 Band 5 and 20 Band 6 Critical Care nurses. The Board have also recruited over 577 newly qualified nurses who have been commencing throughout October and November with some planning to commence in early 2022.

As a result of local and national efforts to recruit staff in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s staffing levels are up 4.7% or by 1,608.3 whole-time equivalent, since March 2020.

Source: NHS Education for Scotland Official NHS Workforce publication, data at June 2021.

The commitment to recruit 800 additional GPs is based on GP headcount and we remain on track to meet that commitment by 2027 as originally set out.

We have taken a number of actions to fulfil this commitment, including increasing the number of medical places at universities, and taking steps to encourage medical graduates to choose general practice. To that end, between 2015-16 and 2021-22 the Scottish Government will have increased the annual intake of medical places in Scottish universities from 848 to 1117 (269 places, a 32% increase). The majority of these new places are focused on general practice.

By increasing the amount of undergraduate curriculum that is delivered in general practice to 25%. We are confident increased exposure to general practice will encourage more students to train as GPs. With an increase of 89 GPs in 2019-20 we are now confident we are starting to see the positive impact of these actions.

There is already a process in place for doing this across the Common Travel Area, and work continues to add additional countries to this service. Full details are available on NHS Inform – see https://www.nhsinform.scot/covid-19-vaccine/after-your-vaccine/get-a-record-of-your-coronavirus-covid-19-vaccination-status/ .

We published an updated evidence paper on the Covid-19 status certification scheme on Friday 19 November 2021.

The full contract notices are published on Public Contracts Scotland. See https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/search/show/search_view.aspx?ID=NOV432052 and https://www.publiccontractsscotland.gov.uk/search/show/search_view.aspx?ID=NOV432062 . I also refer the member to the answer to question S6W-03620 on 17 November 2021. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers .

I refer the member to the answer to questions S6W-04212 and S6W-04213 on 25 November 2021. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers .

I refer the member to the answer to questions S6W-03671 and S6W-03672 on 17 November 2021. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers .

Public Heath Scotland publish a weekly COVID-19 statistical report every Wednesday which includes this information. As at 15 November 2021 the COVID Status app had been downloaded over 1.5 million. It is important to note a single user may choose to download the App on multiple devices so this total figure does not represent unique individuals.

As we do not track individual’s use of their certificates, it is not possible to indicate how many people have used their certificate.

For part’s (b) and (c), the Deputy First Minister wrote to the Covid-19 Recovery Committee setting out the information requested in detail. This can be accessed on the Scottish Parliament website here .

We continually keep our COVID-19 Status Certification scheme under review and consider a range of evidence, data, and information which is already published. Information such as the “ trends in daily data ”; the weekly report on the “ state of the epidemic ”, and the anticipated pressures on our public services. Following that consideration Ministers then report to parliament, detailing the outcome of their review every 3 weeks.