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While the Scottish Government sets the strategic policy for the NHS in Scotland, it is NHS Boards and healthcare professionals locally who have responsibility for both service delivery and ensuring people receive the right care for them, taking into account relevant guidance, local service needs and priorities for investment.

It is therefore for NHS Boards to determine what clinical interventions they offer, while giving regard to the considerations above.

The majority of Scottish health boards participated in the 2022 UK Parkinson’s Audit which measures the quality of Parkinson’s services against international best practice. This includes Patient Reported Experience Measure (PREM) data from people who use Parkinson’s services.

The 2022 Audit showed Scotland outperforming the UK in terms of future care planning, and access to essential professionals such as physiotherapists, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists.

It is for NHS Boards to make decisions and progress on the delivery of services locally, including consideration of delivering the asks proposed at the Scottish Stoma Forum in October 2023. Positive progress shared with the Scottish Government includes: agreeing that the role of a stoma forum should reflect local needs; the range of nursing support available for stoma patients is now more expansive; stoma care is included as part of the Registered Nurse core curriculum; patients can request a review of their care from their local stoma care team at any time, meaning that a formal offer of an annual review should not be required in most cases.

I am pleased to confirm that the NHS Scotland Operational Improvement Plan has published today: www.gov.scot/isbn/9781836914556

The plan focuses on the following four critical aspects to help protect the quality and safety of care, supported by the increased investment for health and social care in the 2025-26 Scottish Budget:

• improving access to treatment;
• shifting the balance of care;
• digital and technological innovation;
• prevention.

It details how the specific commitments outlined in the answer to question S6W-34287 will be delivered – building on health boards’ own delivery planning to prioritise how services will be improved across NHS Scotland. This plan will be followed by publication of a population health framework later in the spring and a health and social care service renewal framework in June.

It is the responsibility of each local authority, who operates Decriminalised Parking Enforcement to ensure their parking attendants are issuing Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) lawfully and the level of discretion that can be applied in individual situations. It is not for the Scottish Government to specify when discretion should be applied. Stringent appeals processes are also in place to assist those who feel they may have been issued a PCN unfairly.

It is the responsibility of each local authority, who operates Decriminalised Parking Enforcement, to provide guidance to ensure their parking attendants are issuing Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) lawfully and the level of discretion that can be applied in individual situations. It is not for the Scottish Government to specify when discretion should be applied. Stringent appeals processes are also in place to assist those who feel they may have been issued a PCN unfairly.

In 2024-25, we allocated over £450,000 to gynaecology from our £30 million targeted investment in planned care, delivering around 3,500 additional new outpatient appointments.

The 2025-26 Budget will provide a record £21.7 billion for Health & Social Care, including a commitment to provide £200 million to help reduce waiting times and improve capacity, and gynaecology is being targeted as a key priority area for additional funding.

Our Women’s Health Champion, Professor Anna Glasier, and I have been meeting with clinicians to better understand the challenges that currently exist within gynaecology services, to discuss innovative solutions, and to reiterate our commitment that timely access to gynaecology services is a key priority area for the Scottish Government and for the next phase of the Women’s Health Plan.

Furthermore, the Scottish Government commissioned Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD) has developed a strong clinically-led Specialty Delivery Groups (SDG) for Gynaecology, which promotes multidisciplinary team working and supports local adoption of service improvement programmes. This group has supported several new and innovative pathway developments, many of which are now being successfully scaled up across Scotland, including Active Clinical Referral Triage (ACRT) and Patient Initiated Review (PIR).

The Scottish Government is taking wide-ranging action to support low income families and to help those in temporary accommodation to live dignified lives.

As part of over £3 billion of investment to tackle poverty and the cost of living for families in 2025-26, we have committed £644 million in our package of benefits and payments only available in Scotland. Among these, the Scottish Child Payment is forecast to be supporting the families of around 333,000 children. We are also continuing to invest around £1 billion a year to provide 1,140 hours of funded early learning and childcare to all three and four year olds and eligible two year olds, helping children to get the best start in life and parents to work and earn more, and supporting families through free bus travel for all under 22s, and free school meal provision for all children in primaries 1 to 5.

We have committed to strengthening the support available to families by further expanding free school meal provision, investing to enable the expansion of breakfast clubs across Scotland, and by developing the systems needed to scrap the impact of the two-child cap by April 2026.

In 2025-26, the Scottish Government will allocate at least £15.8 million for the provision of free income maximisation support, welfare and debt advice, an increase on our allocation for these services in 2024-25.

Scottish Government modelling, published on 27 March 2025, showed that on average, households with children in the poorest 10% of households are estimated to be £2,600 a year better off in 2025-26 as result of Scottish Government policies, with this value projected to grow to an average of £3,700 a year by 2029-30.

A household offered temporary accommodation can be asked to pay a reasonable charge for any accommodation provided directly by the local authority, or a reasonable amount for accommodation supplied by another provider but paid for by the local authority. In deciding what is reasonable, the local authority should take account of the household’s earnings and what the household can afford to pay.

If the household has no income or a low income, the local authority must help the applicant apply for Housing Benefit to help cover the cost of temporary accommodation.

We recognise that there are other costs households may face when living in temporary accommodation, including travel, energy and household equipment costs.

The Scottish Government funds local authorities to administer and disburse the Scottish Welfare Fund. The fund provides emergency support and a lifeline to people in need, through crisis grants to help meet immediate short-term needs arising from exceptional circumstances and community care grants to help eligible people establish or maintain a settled home.

Total known direct costs were £7,792.64 including VAT. This covered publishing costs for the main report and the supporting evidence paper - A Review of Antisocial Behaviour in Scotland - Data Survey and Literature Review; travel expenses of any members/officers who claimed for in-person attendance at meetings and fact-finding visits to two local authority areas; and teas/coffees for meetings.

Members provided their services free of charge with costs - other than travel expenses, which were met by the Scottish Government - being assumed within their own organisation’s budgets. There were no meeting venue costs as these were held hybrid in Scottish Government buildings or members’ sites. Refreshments were also provided by the respective hosts for these meetings. Most engagement meetings, with stakeholders, were hybrid so incurred no direct expense.

We do not hold any other known direct costs or estimates. The group was supported by a secretariat - generally two Scottish Government officials - whose time costs were contained within existing budgets. One member did require printed copies of meeting papers - contained within a central budget. The Scottish Community Safety Network held two online engagement sessions and costs of these were met from within their existing Scottish Government grant.

We fully acknowledge that a cancer diagnosis will be a difficult time. That is why Social Security Scotland continues to prioritise decision-making, with the last nine months of official statistics for Child Disability Payment showing Social Security Scotland has made decisions on new applications almost twice as fast as in the previous financial year.

To date Child Disability Payment has paid out over £1 billion to families with disabled children. 74% of people surveyed in the Social Security Scotland Client Survey: 2023-24 gave a high rating for how much their payment(s) had helped make a difference to their life and helped them pay for what they needed.

There is a dedicated application route for terminally ill children and young people, with previously published data showing that applications are processed in an average of three working days.

In August 2024, I published refreshed guidance to schools on the use of mobile phones, as part of the joint action plan to respond to the Behaviour in Scottish Schools Research.

This guidance was developed in collaboration with the Scottish Advisory Group on Relationships and Behaviour in Schools (SAGRABIS). All members of SAGRABIS were involved in discussions about the content of the guidance and agreed to its publication. Members of SAGRABIS include School Leaders Scotland (SLS), the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS), NASUWT, Scottish Secondary Teachers Association (SSTA), the Association of Head Teachers and Deputes in Scotland (AHDS), and UNISON. Other members of SAGRABIS include COSLA, the Association of Directors of Education (ADES), the Scottish Council of Deans of Education (SCDE), the Association of Scottish Principal Educational Psychologists (ASPEP), parents’ representatives and respectme.