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As part of our National Mission to reduce deaths and improve the lives of people impacted by drug use, the Scottish Government commissioned Scotland Excel, as the centre of procurement expertise in local authorities, to undertake market analysis and engagement with Alcohol and Drugs Partnerships to consider the different routes available to the Scottish Government for developing a national approach to commissioning residential drug and alcohol services.

I can confirm that the Scottish Government did not request confidential commercial information from Scotland Excel as part of this work in 2023. Any information gathered by Scotland Excel as part of this work was done with the knowledge that this would be shared with the Scottish Government in order to inform the market analysis report. As a result, information such as pricing schedules were shared with the Scottish Government in a confidential manner.

In its November 2023 independent assessment of progress on climate adaptation, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) recommended that the Scottish Government should include “a national assessment of the scale of current and future risks from weather-related cascading infrastructure failures” in the next Scottish National Adaptation Plan (SNAP3).

The Scottish Government is considering all recommendations from the CCC on the structure of the next adaptation plan. Public consultation on a draft of the next adaptation plan is anticipated in early-2024 and we have asked the CCC to provide further views at this stage.

The new Palliative Care Strategy aims to ensure that everyone in Scotland, regardless of location, receives well-coordinated, timely and high-quality palliative care, care around death and bereavement support based on their needs and preferences, including support for families and carers.

We are aware of the importance of ensuring that the Strategy takes account of the differing needs of people living in rural and island areas, and of the particular challenges in these areas. Work is currently being undertaken to understand the lived experiences of users of palliative care services in rural and island settings. We have also asked our working groups, who are feeding into the Strategy, to give particular consideration to the impact that any actions they are recommending may have on rural and island areas.

The Scottish Government believes that every child should be given the opportunity to learn to swim, it is a life skill that can save lives.

While the Active Lives Survey relates to England only, we recognise that children living in areas of deprivation may be less likely to be able to swim. We have been working with Scottish Swimming, Education Scotland, sportscotland and Scottish Water to develop interventions and approaches to provide opportunities for children to become confident, safer and competent swimmers. Inclusion has been central to the approach and there is a specific focus on targeting areas within quintile 1 of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. Four Delivery Pilots have taken place to support schools to understand and consider different approaches on how best to support young people to access school swimming. An evaluation, available here , has been published and we will work with Scottish Swimming and sportscotland to utilise the learning from these pilots to consider the best approach for a continued roll out of a national framework for school swimming.

Our Water Safety action plan which focuses on key initiatives to improve education, data, local area water safety planning and incident reviews, was updated in June 2023.

We are now seeing significant and sustained improvements in CAMHS waiting times. In the quarter ending September 2023, 75.6% of CAMHS patients started treatment within 18 weeks of referral, up from 67.9% in same quarter the previous year, and 13 out of 14 CAMHS Services had effectively eliminated their long waits (where 3% or fewer of all waits are over one year).

We continually monitor CAMHS waiting times performance and backlogs and are directing tailored support to those Boards with the longest waits, providing access to professional advice, ensuring they have robust improvement plans in place and monitoring their implementation.

We have commissioned all Boards to submit performance trajectories up to March 2024, including a timeline for clearing long waits. These will be updated annually and used to inform further targeted improvement work to ensure all Boards consistently meet the CAMHS waiting times standard.

We have allocated £48.6 million of supplementary funding to Boards this year via the Mental Health Outcomes Framework to improve the quality and delivery of mental health services for all. This is in addition to £36.7 million allocated to Health Boards via the Outcomes Framework in 2022-23; and to the total package of core funding that Health Boards receive.

Net mental health expenditure is published on the Public Health Scotland website Scottish health service costs under data files mental health expenditure Excel workbook . This information is available for financial years 2011-12 to 2021-22 for each NHS Board in Scotland, split by various types of expenditure including Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). Please note that expenditure data is collected by broad specialties and therefore categories may include multiple services.

Scottish Government continues to provide overall increases to mental health spending. Between the Scottish Government and NHS boards we expect spending on Mental Health to be well in excess of £1.3 bn in 2023/24.

Expenditure on CAMHS rose from £88m in 2020-21 to £97.6m in 2021-22, an increase of £9.3m or 10.6% - representing 0.66% of total NHS expenditure.

Information in the format the member requests is not included in the 2023 report.

Collation and publication of National Dental Inspection Programme data is managed by Public Health Scotland, independently of Scottish Government, and therefore specific enquiries on the dataset should be directed to the named contact within the published report.

There has been no national formal assessment of contraceptive education however the Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that people across Scotland have timely access to contraception, and to information which allows them to make informed decisions about their own sexual and reproductive health. This is recognised as a priority in our recently published Sexual Health and Blood Borne Virus (SHBBV) Action Plan, and we have allocated multi-year funding to a range of projects in both community and NHS settings that will help to deliver this goal. The projects include developing new information resources, such as a national sexual health microsite on NHS Inform, as well as supporting staff training and development around contraception. Details of these projects were published alongside the SHBBV Action Plan on 28 November 2023.

To measure the effectiveness of the Take Hold Marketing campaign, the paid-for-media marketing campaign will be evaluated.

Pre and post campaign qualitative evaluation is conducted by an independent research company, with a representative sample of the target audience of parents, to measure changes in attitudes and behaviours on seeing and engaging with the campaign. In addition a short survey will be shared with schools to evaluate the use and effectiveness of materials provided to them.

Digital metrics will also be used to gauge the impact of the campaign, including but not limited to, numbers of visits to the NHS Inform vaping pages, visits to Parent Club vaping pages, numbers of click throughs from social media and digital advertising and numbers watching campaign digital videos through to completion.

The Scottish Government’s Long Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) Short Life Working Group meets quarterly and includes representation from midwifery, including the Royal College of Midwives.

We are working with the Scottish Postpartum Contraception Network (SPCN), which is a multidisciplinary group of healthcare professionals including midwifery, obstetrics, sexual health, pharmacy, public health and clinical researchers. Since 2022, the Scottish Government has funded SPCN’s work on expanding access to postpartum contraception (including LARC) across Scotland. An additional £101,000 (over 3 years) has recently been allocated to SPCN to deliver a project focused on developing training and information resources, and improving equity of access to postpartum LARC.