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I wrote to Ashley Dalton MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health and Prevention at the Department for Health & Social Care (DHSC) on 8 Aprill 2025 in order to outline the Scottish Government’s position on Clauses 2 and 3 of the Rare Cancers Bill.

Over the last year, my officials have been engaging in active conversation with the UK Government and the other devolved nations on the implementation of the provisions of the Bill.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-40323 on 11 September 2025. 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.

The number of Newly Qualified Paramedics (NQPs) who have joined the Scottish Ambulance Service in the North Region since 2023 are as follows:

2023-24 - 35

2024-25 - 48

2025-26 to date - 36

The purpose of a Significant Adverse Event Review (SAER) is to find out what happened, how it happened and why, and identify learning to reduce the risk of the same event happening again. Due to the nature to SAER reports, they often contain personal and clinical information. The Scottish Government does not require NHS Health Boards to publish SAER reports; however, they should always be shared with the individual concerned, or their family in the event of a death. Following the updated publication by Healthcare Improvement Scotland in February this year of A national framework for reviewing and learning from adverse events in NHS Scotland: February 2025 – Healthcare Improvement Scotland, work is underway to support NHS Health Boards to share learning from SAERs locally and across Health Boards, to make the learning more accessible to healthcare professionals.

Specific data on school-based family income advisors, is not held centrally.

The Scottish Government has invested £1.75 billion in the Scottish Attainment Challenge over the past decade, including over £1billion in Pupil Equity Funding, empowering headteachers to take the best approaches that suit the needs of their pupils and families. This funding is supporting significant numbers of additional staff, like family income advisors, to help close the poverty-related attainment gap.

Across the country we continue to trust and empower Scotland's headteachers to use this extra funding to support their pupils - whether through extra support staff, family link workers or family income advisors. As highlighted in the pupil_equity_funding_report_2025_.pdf, published in May 2025, we know that the majority of the funding supports staff with roles specifically designed to help children and young people impacted by poverty. This includes up to 3,000 additional staff - almost 700 of whom are teachers - with the remainder in roles such as family link workers, pupil support assistants, education psychologists, speech and language therapists and family income advisors.

The Scottish Government also continues to support free income maximisation, welfare and debt advice services with £16.9 million invested in 2025-26, a significant increase on the £12.3 million invested in 2022-23, helping support families get the support they are entitled to.

The specific information - the number of hours NHS staff have spent on trainee research as part of protected development working time - requested is not gathered or held centrally by Scottish Government. This is a matter for the individual Health Boards.

The Scottish Government is committed to supporting NHS Scotland staff development and career progression. As part of the 2023-24 pay deal, Agenda for Change staff have reaffirmed rights to Protected Learning Time (PLT), ensuring access to essential training - including statutory, mandatory, and profession-specific learning - within working hours. Health Boards are expected to support this through consistent policies, including study leave where appropriate. A national PLT Implementation Group is leading work to ensure all NHS staff have equitable access to high-quality learning opportunities, regardless of role or location.

NHS Research Scotland holds a record of the number of clinical studies that Health Boards participate in each year. These data are held from 2014 to present and indicate a range of study numbers from 1464 to 1711 over this time period.

Noting that clinical studies can be carried out across multiple Health Boards at the same time, Table 1 reports the total number of unique clinical studies per year, and Table 2 reports the number of clinical studies per Health Board per year.

The Scottish Government is committed to supporting everyone to live longer, healthier and more fulfilling lives. That is why, the Scottish Government and COSLA recently jointly published a 10-year Population Health Framework. This Framework sets out a whole system, cross-government and cross-sector approach to improve population health and reduce inequalities with a strong focus on prevention.

The Framework aims to improve Scottish life expectancy whilst reducing the gap between the most deprived 20% of local areas and the national average by 2035. It seeks to complement and build upon ongoing and planned action recognising the need to address structural barriers that limit access to services and support, targeting action to those most in need. The Framework identifies 30 initial actions to be implemented in the first two years, all designed to strengthen the key building blocks of health – the social, economic and environmental factors – which combined have a greater effect on health than individual behaviours and health services alone.

One of these 30 actions, already underway, is the introduction of Marmot Places through the Collaboration for Health Equity in Scotland. Under this initiative, local councils and health boards in Aberdeen City, North Ayrshire and South Lanarkshire are receiving expert advice and practical support from Public Health Scotland and the Institute for Health Equity over a two-year period. This work is designed to embed long-term, whole-system approaches locally to improve health equity. Insights from these areas will be shared via a national learning system to inform and accelerate health equity initiatives across Scotland, supporting local action and contributing to measurable improvements in population health.

The opening of a Scottish Government office in Warsaw is currently under review given ongoing budget pressures.

The Scottish Government is committed to increasing the availability of safe and effective medicines that people in Scotland would benefit from. The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) assesses the clinical and cost effectiveness of newly licensed medicines on a once for Scotland basis and publishes advice for Health Boards to consider. It is expected that Health Board Area & Drug and Therapeutics Committees (ADTCs) will consider making an SMC recommended medicine, or an equivalent, available on their local or regional formulary for routine prescribing within 90 days of SMC advice being published.

Health Boards are expected to apply common principles and processes in the introduction of newly licensed medicines to facilitate consistency of approach to local decision-making. The decision to prescribe a medicine, and which medicine to prescribe, is entirely for the clinician in charge of a person’s care, having considered their clinical condition, their safety, and any relevant clinical guidance.