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It is for NHS Boards, in this case NHS Ayrshire & Arran, to plan and provide healthcare services that best meets the needs of local people; consistent with national guidelines and policies.

The Health Board has confirmed that, other than the interim arrangements for the three Intensive Care Unit beds, there are no current plans for the transfer of services.

NHS Ayrshire & Arran advises that no services have transferred during this period. The Health Board has an interim plan to transfer the three Intensive Care Unit beds to ensure safe medical cover.

The Health Board's interim plan to transfer the three ICU beds to University Hospital Crosshouse is to ensure adequate consultant medical cover. Patient safety remains of paramount concern.

NHS Ayrshire and Arran has provided assurances that all feasible options will continue to be explored to maintain the ICU beds at University Hospital Ayr; and that local communities and their representatives will be kept fully updated as this work progresses.

Table 1 presents the latest available statistics on the total waiting list size for patients covered by the Treatment Time Guarantee (TTG) and the number of ongoing waits for treatment within an inpatient or day case setting at 31 December 2022, broken down by waiting times of over (a)two years (104 weeks), (b) two years and six months (130 weeks), and (c) three years (156 weeks) for an orthopaedic procedure.

Table 1 - Number of ongoing waits for an inpatient or day case admission for orthopaedics by length of wait in NHS Scotland, at 31 December 2022

The Scottish Government does not yet have complete YPFF data for the whole period of 2022-23. We expect Health Boards to have provided this data by the end of May 2023.

Further to the answer provided to question S6W-11404 issued on 4 November 2022, I can confirm that all Health Boards now have access to Clinical portals within acute services.

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

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring fund accessibility as part of ongoing implementation. We met with Health Boards in summer 2022 to discuss the implementation of the fund and areas for improvement, including accessibility.

The Scottish Government does not yet have complete YPFF data for the whole period of 2022-23 so we are unable to state the percentage of successful claims across the 12 month period. We expect Health Boards to have provided this data by the end of May 2023.

NTC Forth Valley will open in summer 2023 at a projected cost of £12.7 million.

NTC Golden Jubilee Phase 2 - will open in winter 2023 at a projected costs of £82.3 million.

The business cases for the remaining National Treatment Centre in NHS Ayrshire & Arran, NHS Grampian, NHS Tayside, NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Lothian, including the new Edinburgh Eye Pavilion, are under development and costs/opening dates will be confirmed when final business cases are submitted.

The Scottish Government does not assess clinical diagnostic interventions.

However, non-invasive liver scans, including transient elastography devices such as FibroScan, are recommended by NICE in primary care settings and are currently used in several NHS Boards throughout Scotland to assess liver disease.

Currently, there is limited evidence on the efficacy of these scans in a community care context. Trials to test the expanded use of non-invasive liver scans are ongoing in both primary care and for populations at higher risk of liver disease in community care.