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Public Health Scotland (PHS) publishes statistics on the length of time patients wait to be seen as a new outpatient or admitted for treatment as an inpatient or day case in the Stage of Treatment (SoT) publication. The latest publication release contains data up to quarter ending 31 December 2024.

Table 1 presents the latest available statistics on the total number of attendances and admissions for patients who had waited over a year (52 weeks) as a new outpatient or an inpatient or day case. The following data are presented at NHS Scotland level for all specialties, broken down by calendar year and split by new outpatient and inpatient or day case.

Table 1 – Total number of attendances as a new outpatient and admissions as an inpatient or day case for patients who had waited over a year (52 weeks), NHS Scotland, all specialty level, by calendar year from 2020 to present.

Highly able learners are entitled to support under the Additional Support for Learning (Scotland) Act 2004.

Local authorities oversee the delivery of education and have a statutory duty to identify, provide for, and to review the support that they provide for pupils with additional support needs. This includes highly able children and young people.

There is existing guidance in the Additional Support for learning Statutory Guidance: Additional support for learning: statutory guidance 2017 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot).We have committed to refreshing this during this Parliamentary term and have been working collaboratively with a range of education partners and policy areas to ensure it continues to fully support schools and local authorities to fulfil their duties under the ASL Act.

Education Scotland provide guidance for teachers of learners who are working, or who are capable of working, significantly ahead of their peers. This guidance was last updated on 28 June 2024 and is available here: A summary of resources relating to highly able learners | Resources | Education Scotland.

The Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill is a Member's Bill, introduced to the Scottish Parliament by Liam McArthur MSP, not a Scottish Government Bill. It is the role of the Scottish Parliament Health, Social Care and Sport Committee to scrutinise the Bill and it will be for the Scottish Parliament to decide on whether or not to pass it into law.

The Scottish Government does not hold the information you have requested as international students cannot be identified from the A&E data collected by Public Health Scotland.

As stated in response to S6W-36570 on 17 April 2025, it is for the Scottish Parliament’s Health, Social Care and Sport Committee to scrutinise the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill and it will be for the Scottish Parliament to decide on whether or not to pass it.

The Scottish Government has been clear about its commitment to ensuring that everyone who needs it can access timely and high-quality palliative care, care around dying and bereavement support based on what matters to them.

In October 2024 we published our draft palliative care strategy for consultation. The consultation closed on 10 January 2025 and we are now in the process of analysing the responses. The final strategy and delivery plan will set our direction of travel for the next five years.

Further to that, the Scottish Budget 2025-26 identified funding of £5 million to help support independent hospices deliver pay parity with Agenda for Change (AfC) levels for this and future years.

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

Scottish Government decisions are informed by appropriate analysis of any legal considerations. All legal advice is confidential. It is a long-established convention that legal advice provided to the Scottish Government is not disclosed, and that the Scottish Government does not disclose the source of legal advice other than in the most exceptional circumstances.

The Scottish Government does not hold information on how many international students have accessed GP services in each NHS board area in each year since 1999.

The Scottish Government is supporting the development of UK-wide clinical guidelines on alcohol treatment which will be published this year, and is also committed to publishing a service specification for alcohol treatment and recovery. The clinical guidelines and service specification will set out the need for early detection and prevention of alcohol-related liver disease. Implementation of early detection will build on existing pilot initiatives and services already commissioned in local areas.

Scotland is not alone in experiencing falling birth rates, which is a trend across many high-income countries. This has significant implications for the sustainability of our economies, communities and public services. We want to ensure that Scotland is the ideal place to raise a family, and while deciding to have a child or not is rightly a personal decision, we are identifying and addressing barriers to people starting or expanding families in line with their intentions, through the delivery of Scotland’s Population Strategy.

Our 2022 ‘Attitudes to Family Formation’ research highlighted a range of key factors such as housing and economic pressures driving decisions around family formation in Scotland. In mid-2023, the Ministerial Population Taskforce requested that further research be undertaken to increase the Scottish Government’s awareness of family friendly policies which had been developed and implemented in different countries, including interventions implemented in Nordic countries. A paper was discussed at the December 2024 meeting of the Taskforce which explored initial learning from this research exercise.

This early stage, exploratory research aimed to consider the broader international context and responses to trends around birth rates. As such, implications for costed implementation of interventions in Scotland have not yet been considered. The next steps for this workstream will include further research into parental leave uptake and its impact on fertility decisions. Outputs from this work will be considered accordingly by Scottish Ministers.

GP practices in Glasgow, and elsewhere, must meet minimum standards for their practice premises which comply with their obligations under the Equality Act. This includes taking such steps as are reasonable to provide for ease of access to the practice premises and ease of movement within the practice premises for all users of the practice premises (including wheelchair users) and to provide adequate sound and visual systems for the hearing and visually impaired.

NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde is responsible for ensuring that its GP practices are meeting their contractual obligations.