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Grants to organisations for people with care experience by age

Information on the destination of referrals made for patients in relation to long COVID is not held centrally. This is a matter for territorial NHS Boards.

There are standard procedures in place in hospitals across Scotland for treating patients who present with an overdose, regardless of the substance involved.

As part of the preparation of the SBA (Single Building Assessment process) Scottish Government has had conversations with the wider sector, including Fire Engineers and Assessors where we have discussed the need for a FRAEW (Fire Risk Appraisal of External Wall).

When assessing an existing building’s EWS (External wall system), it is noted that existing buildings cannot be expected to meet modern Building Regulation standards for risk to human life as these buildings were built during a time when less onerous Building Regulations were in force. The PAS 9980 will be used by assessors to make an informed expert decision of whether or not the EWS is a low, medium or high risk and dictate from this whether or not the current build up is tolerable, and no further remediation is required, or the risk is intolerable and therefore remediation should be undertaken.

The aim of a SBA is not to bring a building into compliance with current Building Regulations, but to ensure that the risk to building occupants is reduced to a tolerable level. The focus of the remediation is to follow the recommendations in the SBA in how to bring the relevant parts of the building to either a low, or tolerable risk level. Where large areas of the façade are being remediated, alterations will be required to comply with current (fire) building regulations including the use of acceptable materials. To note that the current ban applies to any new building warrant applications only.

The Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD) has developed strong clinically-led Specialty Delivery Groups (SDG) which promote multidisciplinary team working and support local adoption of service improvement programmes.

This includes the Cataract Sub-Specialty Delivery Group which brings together key ophthalmology clinical, operational and managerial experts from across NHS Scotland and Scottish Government which has been commissioned to support an increase in surgical throughout across cataract only surgical sessions. This short life working group has supported several new and innovative pathway developments, some of which are now being successfully scaled up in a number of sites across hospital eye services, including: high volume cataract surgery in ring-fenced sessions, and delivering one cataract every 30 mins, as per Royal College of Ophthalmologists’ guidelines.

In tandem with this, The National Eyecare Workstream is undertaking clinically led peer reviews which supports new and efficient ways of working and shares best practices across the country across a number of ocular sub-specialties, including cataracts.

Additionally, the national Trauma and Orthopaedic (T&O) planned care team based within the Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD) are responsible for supporting both scheduled (elective) and unscheduled (emergency) orthopaedic service delivery through implementation of sustainable improvements in Scotland.

The orthopaedic services specialty delivery group is multidisciplinary and clinically led to design, develop and implement consensus driven national clinical pathways with focus on high impact opportunities in outpatient management (active clinical triage and patient initiated review), enhanced recovery and same day arthroplasty and also hip fracture standards of care, whilst reducing unwarranted variation. The National T&O team supports delivery of clinically led peer reviews for Health Boards across Scotland, with the cycle repeating every 3 years. These clinically led peer reviews were initiated from the innovative “Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT)” programme. This programme has been highly successful at leading change, reducing variation, improving clinical pathways as well as significantly reducing costs predominantly through reduction in length of stay and improved procurement.

In conjunction with Public Health Scotland (PHS), the T&O team also supports national audits namely the Scottish Hip Fracture Audit and Scottish Arthroplasty Project. These cost effective audits drive continuous improvements through research, standards of care and by a formal governance programme to monitor outcomes. Annual reports are produced for public information.

Furthermore, as part of our wider work to deliver sustained recovery of our Urgent Care services a whole system improvement approach has been adopted. We are working with local teams through the Urgent and Unscheduled Care Collaborative Programme to develop improvement plans which contain actions for the short and medium term focusing across 5 key areas.

This programme of improvement activity is being driven forward by the Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD), which we have commissioned to support Health Boards implement a range of measures to reduce A&E waiting times and improve patient and staff experience.

Some Health Boards have already started to report improvements. These include:

• Improving urgent care pathways in the community and improving links across the primary and secondary care interface.
• Ensuring patients receive the right care in the right place by optimising Flow Navigation Centres and increasing the routes for professional to professional advice and guidance, signposting and scheduling of appointments to A&E where possible.
• Improving access to Hospital at Home services by supporting Boards and partnerships to adopt evidence-based best practice.
• Optimising assessment and care in our Emergency Departments by improving access to ‘same day’ services, the use of early and effective triage, rapid decision-making and streaming to assessment areas.
• Reducing the time people need to spend in hospital by promoting early and effective discharge planning and robust and responsive operational management.
  

The Computing Science Hardware grant was offered to all Local Authorities to submit a bid to Scottish Government for schools in their Local Authority area and claims were received from a total of 304 schools, representing 85% of all secondary schools in Scotland. Since the scheme was operated at local authority level we are unable to comment on the reasons why individual schools chose not to take up the offer.

In May 2022 Transport Scotland convened the Zero Emission Truck Taskforce comprising senior leaders from haulage operators, the manufacturing, energy and financial sectors, government, and unions with the purpose of co-designing an ambitious pathway to HGV decarbonisation in Scotland. This pathway was published on 19 March 2024 and identifies four key challenges, including energy infrastructure, with clear actions to address them. The pathway and the evidence that supported it has been shared with the UK Government to inform the development of its HGV and coach energy infrastructure strategy.

As one of the actions within the pathway, the Scottish Government is working with academics and haulage fleets to understand where energy infrastructure will be required for trucks on longer journeys in Scotland. The UK government is aware of this work.

At the Inter-Ministerial Group meeting on transport between the four nations on 5 February, I reinforced the need for close collaboration in both the HGV energy infrastructure strategy and the zero emission HGV and infrastructure demonstrator projects.

Scottish Government officials are participating in a series of working groups that have been set up since that ministerial meeting, working with counterparts from the UK Government and devolved administrations on issues relating to the strategy.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on how many 3G rubber pitches there are in Scotland.

In 2023, sportscotland identified that there were 505 full size (approx. 100x60m) synthetic surfaces in Scotland. Of those 398 are 3G with polymeric infill.