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Decisions on the allocation of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) resources, including the number and location of control rooms, are matters for the SFRS board.

Scottish Ministers set out priorities and objectives for SFRS to have regard to in the carrying out of its functions, in the Fire and Rescue Framework for Scotland, as detailed in Section 40 of the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 (as amended). In addition, Scottish Ministers have powers to direct SFRS, as detailed in section 42a of the Act.

Property Estate - Strategic Intent is a Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) paper which was considered at its board meeting on 26 September 2013. Decisions in relation to the SFRS’s property estate requirements for specified support functions are for the SFRS board. The minutes of the board meeting recording the decisions made can be found on the SFRS website.

The Scottish Government has regular meetings with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS). Decisions on the allocation of its resources, including the number and location of control rooms, is a matter for the SFRS board.

The Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 (as amended) confers a duty to participate in community planning on the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS), and sets out at Section 41J(2)(c) that this duty must be delegated to the designated Local Senior Officer for each local authority area.

Section 41E of the Act sets out the content and process for preparing local fire and rescue plans. Local plans for each of Scotland’s 32 local authorities are currently open for public consultation and can be accessed through the SFRS website www.firescotland.gov.uk.

In addition, the Fire and Rescue Framework for Scotland 2013 sets out priorities and objectives for SFRS to have regard to in the carrying out of its functions, as detailed in Section 40 of the Act. The Fire Framework has a strong focus on the strengthened connection between SFRS and local communities.

The Scottish Government’s 20:20 Workforce Vision: Everyone Matters recognises the key role the workforce will play in responding to the challenges that NHS Scotland is facing, however it is for NHS boards to assess and plan to meet the needs of their local population, including planning for the appropriate workforce to be in place.

In addition, the Chief Health Professions Officer commissioned NHS Education for Scotland (NES) to undertake a workforce review to scope workforce intelligence about a number of allied health professions (AHP). Initial reports covering speech and language therapy and occupational therapy have now been completed and will shortly be presented to the AHP strategic workforce group.

The Scottish Government employs a Chief Health Professions Officer (CHPO) who provides policy and professional advice on all allied health professions, including speech and language therapy. The CHPO works closely with a network of national leads (two of whom are speech and language therapists), Allied Health Professions (AHP) Directors in NHS boards and with the Allied Health Professions Federation which represents all AHP professional bodies including the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Speech and language therapists work closely with individuals and their parents, families and carers where appropriate to ensure that the support, advice or intervention offered is appropriate to the needs of the individual, this can include supporting the individual to self-manage.

(a) Domain Name requests had not been failing previous to the incident.

(b) Web filtering software was not brought online on the day of the incident and is not relevant to the incident of 1 October 2013.

More than 10,000 patients were attended by medical staff during the IT failure of 1 October 2013. As there was variable access to both electronic and paper clinical notes throughout the incident it is not possible to quantify for how many patients clinical notes were not available in each case.

NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s statistics for “Outage” include incidents where systems remain fully available to users, but elements are undergoing maintenance or remedial activities. In the period 2 October to 3 December there have been 10 planned outages (all restricted to either individual applications or sites. All occurred either out of hours when no users dependent on the services, or by pre-arrangement such that no risk to services occurred). There have been four periods of unplanned partial/total individual server outages during the period under review. These ranged between five and 60 minutes and on none of these occasions were patient services disrupted. This must be placed within the context of an IT estate with over 400 applications, supporting 11 major hospitals, over 250 GP and Health Centres and 40,000 staff.