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The Scottish Government has continued its work with Public Health Scotland to develop an online platform for members of the public to access information on the average waiting times for a range of specialties within their health board area.

It is expected that the specialities included will be in line with the National Statistics currently published, which can be found here: https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/13252/ipdc_may22.xlsx in Table 2.1.

A date is still to be confirmed for the publication of the online platform so we are unable to provide any further details at this time. We would be happy to provide the member with further updates on progress as these become available.

Under this government (since 2007), the number of Psychiatric Consultants across all Specialities in NHS Scotland has increased by 21.6% to 548.8 whole time equivalent posts as of March 2022.

In 2020-21 and 2021-22, the Scottish Government has invested in increasing the number of trainee places on Core and Specialist Psychiatry training programmes. The number of posts advertised for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry specialist training increased from 6 in 2020 to 10 in 2022.

The Scottish Government are working with NHS Education for Scotland and the Royal College of Psychiatry to better understand the challenges associated with recruitment and retention in Psychiatry and encourage medical students to consider a long-term career as a psychiatrist. This work includes the ‘Choose Psychiatry’ campaign, undergraduate taster sessions, and improved psychiatric placements at Foundation level.

Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Training

Recruitment information regarding this trainee group has been recorded since 2013. The following figures refer to successfully recruited candidates and represent the cohort trained each year.

Recruitment to Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (Specialist Training - Year 4)

Public Health Scotland published the Melanoma Quality Performance Indicators report on 7th June. It can be found here: Melanoma Cancer Quality Performance Indicators - Patients diagnosed between July 2018 and June 2021 - Melanoma Cancer Quality Performance Indicators - Publications - Public Health Scotland .

As at March 2022, a total of 260 WTE Mental Health workers have been recruited through the Primary Care Improvement Fund. This data was published on 21 June 2022 - ( Primary Care Improvement Plans: Summary of Implementation Progress at March 2022 ).

We acknowledge that some people can feel unwell after any vaccination, however at this time there is no compensation for those who take time off work following a vaccination, including COVID-19. The UK Government have a vaccines damages payment scheme in place for anyone who becomes severely unwell Vaccine Damage Payment: Overview - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) .

In 2019-2020 the Scottish Government spent £15,849,263.61 in 2020 (1 April 2019 – 31 March 2020) and £11,106,352.64 in 2020/21 (1 April 2020 – 31 March 2021) on the maintenance of the Forth Road Bridge.

In March 2021, we published our Respiratory Care Action Plan for Scotland, setting out our commitments to drive improvement in the prevention, diagnosis, care, treatment and support of people living with respiratory conditions such as bronchiectasis.

We recognise the importance of data in understanding respiratory care in Scotland. Our Plan contains a key commitment to build a core respiratory data set, which will enable the Scottish Government, NHS Boards and clinicians to identify improvements needed in delivery of respiratory care and also monitor how the implementation of our Plan is delivering better outcomes for people in Scotland.

At its first meeting in October, the Scottish Respiratory Advisory Committee (SRAC) identified data as one of the 3 key priorities for year 1 of implementation.

We have since established a sub-group consisting of clinical experts representing health boards across Scotland, Public Health Scotland and third sector representation to progress and deliver this commitment. The sub-group have held their first meeting and are in the process of commencing a scoping exercise on the data currently available across Scotland, before determining what data should be collected in the future in order to improve respiratory care.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-09214 on 28 June 2022. 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

NHS Boards do not currently collate numbers of bronchiectasis diagnoses over and above the usual coding of patients that happens as standard at local level. We do recognise the importance of data in understanding and improving respiratory care in Scotland, and improving access to respiratory data is a key commitment in our Respiratory Care Action Plan. One of the three priority areas for year 1 of the Plan’s implementation is data and a sub-group has recently been established to progress this commitment. The first task for this group will be to determine what data should be collected in order to improve respiratory care. This will include consideration of which individual conditions would benefit from additional data collection.

The information requested is not held centrally.