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This year’s winter vaccination programme seeks to protect those at the highest risk of severe illness and hospitalisation from COVID-19 and flu, and reduce pressure on the NHS and social care services.

Ensuring accessibility for the most vulnerable has, therefore, been central to our approach throughout the vaccination programme.

In line with this, instead of the large-scale vaccination centres used in previous programmes, this winter we are offering smaller, more local clinics to facilitate access and minimise travel times to appointments.

Housebound patients have been vaccinated in their homes, with some health boards utilising the Scottish Ambulance Service to support this. Health boards may also offer support to patients with limited mobility in travelling to their vaccination appointment. Details of this can be found on the NHS Inform website.

The Scottish Government does not hold data on the number of appointments offered per full time equivalent GP.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) will publish data on activity levels in General Practice on 6 December 2022. This will include activity by encounter type. Encounters are recorded each time a member of the practice team enters information into the GP electronic health record. These include face to face consultations, telephone consultations, e-consultations, medicines management and administration.

The data will be published as experimental statistics, reflecting the developing nature of the data in relation to quality and ability to meet user needs.

PHS will also publish the GP In Hours General Practice Workforce Survey on 29 November 2022, which will provide estimates of GP workforce numbers.

Notwithstanding NHS Lanarkshire’s staffing levels are at a record high, with 33% growth under the SNP government compared to 22.1% across NHSScotland, we are providing continued assistance by investing in domestic labour supply, international recruitment, training, and retention.

That is why we have a £600 million package of measures that will get us through the winter, which includes hiring up to 750 nurses, midwives and allied health professionals from overseas and 250 additional support staff across acute, primary care and mental health.

Over the last 10 years we have doubled the number of funded places for Nursing and Midwifery to a target intake in 2022-23 of 4,837. Scotland already trains more doctors per head than elsewhere in the United Kingdom, and we’re working to increase Scotland’s medical undergraduate intake by 500 by the end of the parliament.

After initial planning work with transport partners and stakeholder, Transport Scotland officials are engaged in finalising the programme for the National Rail Conversation, including the first significant public phase, of external stakeholder engagement. This will see key stakeholders, including rail staff representatives, invited to a number of events in the New Year. These sessions will enable those taking part to offer their views on the National Rail Conversation. Further details of the programme will be provided at these even and announced in due course.

As in all previous phases of the pandemic, Scottish Government officials continue to meet with and communicate with their UK Government and other Four Nations counterparts almost daily, on a range of different areas of work related to COVID-19 vaccination.

Regular topics of discussions include security and supply, communications and marketing approaches, data collection and analysis, COVID-19 policy and planning, the progress of our respective winter COVID-19 vaccination programmes across the Four Nations and to share learning and best practice.

The information requested is not collected or held centrally by the Scottish Government and would require to be obtained from Health Boards.

We meet with developers every week, particularly in relation to the pilot Single Building Assessment programme and the development of The Accord.

Asthma patient hospitalisations, age-sex standardised rate per 100,000

The Scottish Government does not hold data on remediation activity outwith the Cladding Remediation Programme. The Single Building Assessment pilot is currently assessing 27 buildings and this will be increased in number in 2023.

The Scottish Government does not hold data on emergency presentations of cancer.

We are committed to diagnosing cancer as early and as quickly as possible which is why we continue to invest in our Detect Cancer Early (DCE) Programme and are rolling out Rapid Cancer Diagnostic Services. Work is underway to develop a new earlier diagnosis vision in Scotland - this will form part of the new cancer strategy, due to publish Spring 2023.