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It is not possible to indicate how directly connected the savings generated by the State Hospital relate to the Choices for a Purpose report.

a) Total savings delivered in each of the years are as follows:

b) Cumulative ‘recurring’ savings delivered during the same period totalled £7.4 million.

The baseline budget for each year was:

I have asked Colin McConnell, Chief Executive of the Scottish Prison Service, to respond. His response is as follows:

“The Scottish Prison Service is currently developing a strategy for the management of women in custody in parallel with the development of Scotland’s new national establishment for women offenders, HMP & YOI Inverclyde. This development is currently in design phase. A key aspect of this is the appropriate application of technology, including supporting improved family contact, alongside other offender outcomes.

HMP & YOIs Grampian and Cornton Vale already make use of their video conferencing facilities for virtual visits and all establishments utilise the email-a-prisoner service which enables prisoners to receive email correspondence.”

NHS Education for Scotland have developed and been delivering two day workshops on mentalisation-based therapy (MBT) skills and awareness for staff in forensic settings. Staff from a range of disciplines including nurses, psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists and occupational therapists, have been equipped with a working knowledge of MBT which they will be able to put into use in their current practice.

The Scottish Government and NHS Education for Scotland are working with NHS Grampian to develop capacity to deliver evidence based MBT in NHS Scotland. Through MBT Scotland, hosted by NHS Grampian, it will establish an MBT network to help clinical teams across Scotland establish the necessary skills and expertise to deliver MBT across complex groups, including personality disorder.

The Scottish Government has made commitments in the Mental Health Strategy 2012-15 to improve services and address the challenges around mental health and offending. £158k is available over the three years from 2013 to 2016 to support the funding of these initiatives.

The Mental Health Strategy for Scotland includes a specific commitment to build on the work carried out at HMP&YOI Cornton Vale by testing the effectiveness of training prison staff in a ‘mentalisation’ approach to working with women with personality disorder and women who have experienced trauma. The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) is working in partnership with NHS Lothian to test approaches to working with women with borderline personality disorder. Funding has been provided by the Scottish Government Mental Health Division to support a two-year pilot programme at HMP&YOI Cornton Vale and HMP Edinburgh with the aim of improving the care, treatment and support of women with personality disorders through the development of therapeutic relationships and environment.

The SPS women offenders project team is also working in collaboration with Professor Lindsay Thomson, Chair of the National Prisoner Healthcare Network Mental Health Workstream to develop a model of care to meet the future management of women with high care needs, as part of the service planning work in progress for HMP Inverclyde. Additionally, HMP&YOI Cornton Vale is collaborating with a pilot intervention for women assessed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which will be delivered by a team lead by Professor Kevin Power, University of Stirling. SPS will continue to participate in the care programme approach in the management of restricted patients who may be accommodated in prison.

Information relating to parts (b) and (c) of the question is not held centrally.

Queen Victoria School is registered with Scottish Ministers as an independent school and there are no plans to change the status of such schools in the event of independence.

The Scottish Government recognises the importance of stability in the education of the children of service personnel. In the event of independence it would therefore enter into responsible discussion with the government of the rest of the UK, which would also have a strong interest in maintaining continuity of education for children of its service personnel at the school. Discussions would include the availability of places at the Queen Victoria School to children of service personnel from the rest of the UK and from the Commonwealth.

It may also be helpful to say that in Scotland’s Future Scottish Ministers have confirmed that terms and conditions of service personnel will remain harmonised with those of the UK through a transitional period. That would include the Continuity of Education Allowance, where eligibility criteria are met.

As at 30 April 2014 the estimated number of patients at Dumfries Dental Centre, Lochmaben, and Sanquhar, in receipt of routine general dental services, was as follows:

Registration with a NHS dentist will be maintained for all these patients.

The Scottish Government notes the Mental Welfare Commission’s report on The care and treatment of Mrs CD.

In meeting commitment 19 of the Mental Health Strategy 2012-15 on improving how services respond to distress, a draft report on work to develop and test an approach which focuses on improving responses to distress will be published by NHS Tayside later this year.

Responding to people in distress is one of five themes in the recently published Suicide Prevention Strategy (2013–2016). In addressing commitment 1 under this theme and building on the work in relation to commitment 19 above, we have arranged three stakeholder events, the next one being on 24 June 2014 in Glasgow, to allow colleagues from a range of sectors to work through the challenge of improving responses to the underlying causes of distress in people for whom current practices are ineffective.

Commitment 30 of the Mental Health Strategy: 2012-15 builds on the work at HMP Cornton Vale testing the effectiveness of training prison staff in a 'mentalisation' approach to working with women with borderline personality disorder and women who have experienced trauma. We have provided funding to support a two-year pilot programme at HMP & YOI Cornton Vale and HMP Edinburgh with the aim of improving the care, treatment and support of women with personality disorders through the development of therapeutic relationships and environment. The Scottish Prison Service (SPS) is currently reviewing how best to incorporate the concept of ‘mentalisation’ into the development of the SPS Framework for the Management of Women Offenders in Custody and the Staff Training Strategy.

We have also committed to work with NHS Lothian to test an approach to working with women with borderline personality disorder in the community by extending the Willow Project in Edinburgh. We will use the learning from this to inform service development more widely across Scotland.

NHS National Services Scotland manages the contract for high secure services in Scotland on behalf of NHS Scotland.

The State Hospital, Carstairs stopped admitting female patients in 2008. The costs for female patients treated in high secure services in England are only available from 2011-12 and are as follows:

We are working with NHS boards to deliver commitment 12 of the Mental Health Strategy to reduce admissions of under 18s to adult wards, with a new commitment to reduce figures across Scotland to a figure linked to current performance in the South of Scotland area during delivery of the strategy timeframe 2012-15. To support this we have:

Made a significant investment (£13.5 million from 2009 to 2014) to deliver faster access to specialist child and adolescent mental health services in the community; and in the CAMHS workforce which has seen the overall clinical workforce increase by 44% since 2008.

We have with ISD and the CAMHS regional tier 4 network, developed a data set to track progress in developing intensive community treatment teams and how the adolescent inpatient units are working. We are continuing to work with the CAMHS regional tier 4 networks to ensure that tier 4 services for children and young people are operating effectively and safely.

To meet the needs of children and adolescents, the North of Scotland are building a new 12 bed inpatient unit to replace the current 6 bed unit. This will increase the national bed base from 42 to 48 beds, and improve the quality of the estate.

There are some reasons why it may not always be possible for a young person to be admitted to a specialist child and adolescent bed, for example, a crisis admission out of hours where there are concerns for the young person’s safety, or where a specialist facility might be a considerable distance from family support that could help recovery.