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The Scottish Government is grateful for the work done by the SCER to promote informed debate and produce high quality policy analysis since its establishment in 2017. In particular, the Government notes the SCER’s thoughtful work on the reception that an independent Scotland will receive on applying to rejoin the EU as an independent Member State. As the Director of the SCER noted in her statement of 14 July 2021, the SCER has operated as an independent think tank and has not received research funding from the Scottish Government.

The Scottish Government is willing at all times to consider representations on ways in which the political debate in Scotland can be informed and further improved.

Table 1 shows the average daily number of Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) Contact Tracers scheduled to work on the COVID-19 Test and Protect service each week from 1 May. These are projected workforce figures taken from management information submitted by Health Boards in weekly returns and therefore do not necessarily represent final deployment figures. Wider support and administration staff are not included in these returns.

The Scottish Government does not hold data centrally on the proportion of these staff who are secondees or redeployed; the secondment and deployment of staff is a matter for each board.

Table 1. Whole Time Equivalent Contact Tracers working for the COVID-19 Test and Protect service in each week from 1 May 2021

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-01507 on
‎ 30 July 2021. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at Written questions and answers | Scottish Parliament Website

Tackling health inequalities remains a clear ambition for this Government. Our Programme for Government 2020 sets out our commitment to promote lifelong health and wellbeing including a renewed focus on tackling health inequalities.

The impact of persistent deprivation, poverty and other long-standing social inequalities – which we know impact on health – have been thrown into sharp relief by COVID-19. In the face of the pandemic we acted quickly to ensure that local authorities, third sector partners and community organisations were empowered to take the action needed to protect people from the social harms of the virus. In the course of 2020-21, we allocated over £1 billion to help people and communities impacted by the pandemic and to build resilience in public services. We will continue to give our communities and local services the support they need to tackle these issues head on.

We know that socioeconomic inequalities drive health inequalities and we must focus our efforts on addressing poverty, promoting fair wages and improving our physical and social environments. In line with the Scottish Fiscal Commission forecasts, we are committing £3.5 billion in forecast social security payments which will reach over 800,000 people. Money which will go directly to the people in Scotland who need it the most. This includes £68 million for the first full year of the Scottish Child Payment, a ‘game changing’ new benefit which will be instrumental in tackling child poverty. We are bringing this together with healthcare through our Welfare Advice and Health Partnerships that integrate local authority and third sector welfare rights and money advice services into primary care services.

Scotland has a proud history of taking ambitious action to improve health and we continue to make progress against our Public Health Priorities and major healthy living action plans. These strategies are already tackling some of the most significant health challenges we face including diet, alcohol and smoking. These bold packages of measures will help tackle key issues and support everyone in Scotland to live longer healthier lives. This includes bringing forward legislation to restrict promotions of unhealthier foods, evaluating the impact that Minimum Unit Pricing of alcohol has had and introducing a smoke-free perimeter around all hospital buildings.

As we look to renew and recover as a society, we will continue to ensure the necessary resource is directed at improving equity for our people and communities who are most in need.

The breast screening programme is governed by the Breast Screening Programme Board as well as the National Screening Oversight and the Scottish Screening Committee. They monitor and evaluate performance, including uptake rates, against a set of standards developed by Healthcare Improvement Scotland.

Since the breast screening programme restarted last summer, additional steps have been taken to ensure uptake of appointments despite the impact from the Covid-19 pandemic. These include:

• breast screening centres contacting participants ahead of their appointments to confirm their intention to attend;
• providing information to reassure people that infection control measures are in place and, during lockdown, that attending a screening appointment was considered essential travel; and
• clearly communicating the importance of screening, along with tailored messaging to recognise additional concerns and challenges caused by the pandemic, for example for people who were shielding.

The Scottish Government recognises that the Covid-19 pandemic may have exacerbated inequalities in screening uptake across all national screening programmes, and we have committed £2 million over the next two years, to build a programme of evidence-based, sustainable and scalable projects that tackle inequalities in a systemic way.

The current national waiting times statistics for CAMHS and Psychological Therapies do not provide a breakdown of who is waiting for specific types of treatment. Therefore, we are unable to report on specific waits for suicide prevention treatments.

A patient level data set (CAMHS and PT National Dataset) is currently under development by PHS which will provide more detail on the diagnosis and treatments received by individuals, and associated waiting times.

It is the responsibility of individual health boards to provide high quality care that is safe, effective and person-centred. If a child or young person presents as being at real and immediate risk of harm to themselves, to others, health Boards should see these people as urgent cases and prioritise seeing them regardless of where they are on a waiting list.

The annual teacher census collects information on the basis of teaching posts, not people. Some teachers hold multiple posts which may mean the information held does not represent the nature of an individual teacher’s employment contract or the overall working pattern of that teacher.

Employment type in the following table relates to each post that a teacher holds, rather than their employment contract. This means that a teacher may have a permanent employment contract with the local authority but be recorded with a temporary employment type for an individual post.

The Scottish Government is committed to expanding the universal provision of free school lunches to include all primary school children, during school term-time, by August 2022.

The option for all women aged 71 and over to self-refer for a breast screening appointment will resume once capacity in all screening centres returns to pre-Covid or close to pre-Covid levels. This is based on the recommendation of the Scottish Screening Committee, the National Screening Oversight and the Breast Screening Programme Board, all three of whom are keeping the situation under regular review. They are also working closely with Health Boards to increase appointments and meet this criteria as soon as possible.

As breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, it can occur in more than one family member by chance, and most cases of breast cancers are not hereditary. However, particular genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, can increase the risk of developing breast cancer, and these can be passed on from parent to child. Arrangements have therefore been made to ensure that women aged 71 and over can continue to be screened for the duration of the self-referral pause if they have been identified as being at very high risk because they have BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes.

We also continue to emphasise that everyone should remain symptom aware and report any symptoms to their GP immediately for these to be investigated.

The Scottish Government only collects school pupil attendance and absence information every 2 years, so no data is available for 2017-18.

Information for 2018/19 shows that for term 3 (covering the period roughly April-June) the combined authorised and unauthorised absence rate was 7.6%.

In 2019-20, schools/hubs were only open to the children and young people of keyworkers, and those who were vulnerable, in the period April to June 2020.(due to the Covid pandemic). Therefore, most children and young people were not to attend school during this period. As such, at its highest, only around 1.7% of all pupils were attending these schools/hubs at any given time during this period.

For 2020-21, for the period in question (i.e. April to June 2021), the combined rate for pupils not in school due to Covid-19 related reasons and Non-Covid-19 related reasons was 10.4%. Note that this data has been produced on a slightly different basis to the biennial National Statistics publication. For example, some pupils who are currently counted as 'not being in school' may in fact be recorded as being in attendance (e.g. pupils who were self-isolating but were able to learn from home)when the Scottish Government publishes its usual National Statistics publication on School Attendance and Absence 2020/21 which is due later this year.

Care should be made if attempting to compare results across academic years due to varying ways in how this data was gathered over the most recent academic years, together with variation in the levels of quality assurance being undertaken on the data gathered.