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We recognise the incredible contribution that Scotland’s unpaid carers make to our communities and know that the pandemic has added significant additional pressures. We are committed to giving a strong voice to unpaid carers, listening to their needs and acting on what they tell us.

We will develop and publish a stand-alone Carers Strategy with a focus on COVID-19 recovery and improving carer support in a meaningful and sustainable way. The strategy will focus on carers and their needs, setting out how policies across the Scottish Government can work together with other public bodies to support carers as we recover from the pandemic and beyond.

We will engage with unpaid carers about the strategy’s scope and purpose in the coming months, and this will inform its development. Our approach to the development of the strategy will be both a collaborative and an iterative one which will draw on the knowledge and lived experience of unpaid carers so that the strategy is shaped by those who best understand the many challenges faced. We will seek to publish the strategy as soon as possible to provide a clear vision for how we will respond to the challenges faced by so many carers.

Total expenditure on the organ donation campaign in Scotland since the Human Tissue (Authorisation) (Scotland) Act 2019 received Royal Assent, on the referred media, is £657,922.31. This is broken as follows:

On 14 December I confirmed in my statement to Parliament that the implementation date of Scotland’s Deposit Return Scheme will be 16 August 2023. Accordingly, revised regulations were laid on 15 December which will change the date by which producers are required to register with SEPA to 1 March 2023 (instead of 1 March 2022). Once the revised regulations come into force, the registration window for producers is in effect changed to the period from 1 January 2023 to 28 February 2023.

Limited information is published in the Stage of Treatment publication on cancellation by service rates. You will find this information at: Stage of treatment waiting times - Inpatients, day cases and new outpatients 30 November 2021 - NHS waiting times - stage of treatment - Publications - Public Health Scotland

Information covering October 2021 to December 2021 will be published by PHS in February 2022.

This data is not currently available in the format requested. Public Health Scotland (PHS) collect and report vaccine wastage data for Scotland. The latest publication of vaccine wastage data is publicly available in the Public Health Scotland COVID-19 Statistical Report.

A further update will be included in the edition to be published on 15 December 2021.

The information requested is not held centrally by the Scottish Government, due to the possibility of patient identifiable information.

The information requested relating to how many Hospital Infection Incident Assessment Tool Red reports it received in respect of aspergillus infection at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital and on what date is not centrally held by the Scottish Government due to potentially patient identifiable information.

The information requested is not centrally held by the Scottish Government. Information on case reviews is held by the appropriate health board for local learning and quality improvement purposes.

The following table outlines the number of calls made to the Dumb Dumpers hotline each year since 2014. As a result of the cyber attack experienced by SEPA, the Dumb Dumpers Hotline was down between 24 December 2020 and 27 June 2021.

During this time, the public were still able to report flytipping incidents through the online form on the Zero Waste Scotland website.

However, due to this cyber attack, we do not have access to Dumb Dumpers data between 1 November and 24 December 2020.

* Figures from 1 June 2020 to 30 October 2020

** Figures from 28 June 2021 to 30 November 2021