The Scottish Budget: 2024 to 2025 allocated £2.2 million to the Scan for Safety programme. Funds available will meet initial costs of new systems and necessary licences; provide boards with advisors on implementation; meet the costs of scanning handsets; and, help to introduce scanning in services where implanted devices are used.

The Heart Disease Action Plan recognises the need to ensure timely and equitable access to diagnostics, including echocardiography. We remain committed to supporting Boards to target resources to reduce waiting times through service innovation and redesign.

This includes the Centre for Sustainable Delivery's (CfSD) Accelerated National Innovation Adoption Pathway (ANIA) which focuses on using technology to fast-track proven innovations into the healthcare frontline that will improve patient outcomes.

As part of this work, CfSD is currently considering the roll out of innovations that optimise delivery of the heart failure diagnostic pathway, in which access to echocardiography is an important component.

The NHSScotland Scan For Safety Programme was established to provide rapid electronic traceability for high-risk implantable medical devices; linking patients to the medical devices used in their care, thus improving patient safety and fulfilling a key theme from the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Review and a future regulatory requirement. In addition, the improved medical device data will provide a patient implant record and with appropriate safeguards provide an opportunity to improve our knowledge of real world medical device outcomes.

Implementation of NHS Scotland Scan for Safety has now been successfully completed in four specialties within two Health Boards and the Programme Team is currently engaging with the local Board teams to measure the benefits being realised in these Health Board areas. The benefits to be realised over time will cover areas such as patient safety, operational efficiency and clinical productivity. While the level of each benefit will depend on the Health Board implementing scanning technology across all affected specialties within a Board area, the Programme Team will work closely with each Board to ensure the identified benefits are maximised as much as possible between now and programme closure in March 2026.

Since the rollout of the National Inventory Management System (IMS)(a pre-cursor in supporting rollout of the Scan for Safety Programme), across all Health Boards in March 2023, data is now available across all Health Boards which suggests savings may be made regarding stock management in each Board area. This data will be validated with each Health Board as part of the Scan for Safety Programme implementation activity, due to be completed by March 2026. The level of savings (or avoidance) will vary in each Board. These benefits will be aggregated at a national level in due course and reported through to the National Programme Board as implementation progresses. Some benefits, such as the digital tracking of medical devices in the event of a recall, can only be realised and verified if a recall notice is received and this may not happen during the lifecycle of the programme.

The NHS Scotland Scan for Safety Programme is focused on improving traceability and patient outcomes for high risk implantable medical devices. The Programme has established pilot sites in NHS Lothian and NHS Golden Jubilee with both sites implementing Point of Care data capture in key specialities.

NHS Western Isles will commence implementation of Scan for Safety in March 2024. Work is underway to confirm further NHS Boards for roll-out in financial year 2024-25. It is planned at present to implement Scan for Safety across territorial boards by the end of March 2026.

The Scottish Government recently provided details of plans connected to electronic patient records to the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee – see Electronic patient record | Scottish Parliament Website

The Scottish Government is collaborating with four nations partners on the adoption of data standards and has representation on various UK-level groups. Through our Data Strategy for Health and Social Care we have committed to setting out the preferred standards for use across the sector to facilitate interoperability and the sharing of patient records. In progressing this aim we have recently engaged with English and Welsh colleagues on their approach to adopting and publishing standards.

The Scottish Government has been committed to ensuring that all children in primary school receive at least two hours of physical education (PE) each school week since 2011. Our decision to set a target of two hours of PE for primary school children was prompted by recommendations made by the National Physical Activity Task Force which recommended “taking part in at least two hours of quality physical education classes a week and gaining the appropriate movement and behavioural skills needed for an active life”.

The Scottish Government is continuing to provide a range of recruitment support, training and development activity to assist Health Boards in securing an appropriate mix of experienced and newly qualified staff for their National Treatment Centres (NTCs). As at 30 September 2023, close to 600 people were employed in an NTC, of which around 32% were undertaking their first role in NHS Scotland.

We keep under active review the total number of staff that we will ultimately need to recruit to our National Treatment Centres and to support the overall ambition to increase planned care activity and reduce waiting times, as set out in the NHS Recovery Plan.

The National Treatment Centres (NTCs) Programme is the single biggest increase in planned care capacity ever created in NHS Scotland. Five new National Treatment Centres (NTCs) will be opened by 2024 at Golden Jubilee (Phase 1 and 2), NTC Fife, NTC Highland and NTC Forth Valley. Combined these centres will have eight orthopaedic theatres; an inpatient/day-case ward; three endoscopy rooms and two general theatres.

As a result of the almost 10% cut in our capital budget from the UK Government, we are having to revise our pipeline of infrastructure investment and we do not expect National Treatment Centres in Ayrshire and Arran, Grampian, Lanarkshire, Lothian and Tayside to be progressed in the short to medium term. The figure of 40,000 additional activities from the 2021 recovery plan is dependent on all National Treatment Centres in development being operational, therefore we expect the additional annual activity from the programme to be 20,000 from 2024-25.

Waiting times for planned care services is one of many metrics that contributes to the monitoring of performance and effectiveness across NHSScotland.

There have been several changes to waiting time targets and standards over the last 30 years. The Patient Rights (Scotland) Act 2011 established a 12 week Treatment Time Guarantee (TTG) written into legislation for eligible patients who are due to receive planned inpatient or day case treatment from 1 October 2012. The Act states that eligible patients must start to receive that treatment within 12 weeks (84 days) of the treatment being agreed. This guarantee is based on completed waits where a patient is removed from the list after being admitted for treatment.

To support the above guarantee, from 31 March 2010 no patient should wait longer than 12 weeks for a new outpatient appointment at a consultant-led clinic. More information on this can be found on the Public Health Scotland website section on waiting times .

More recently, in July 2022 new targets were set out for NHSScotland to address the impact of the pandemic on long waiting times for planned care. Public Health Scotland publish progress against these targets quarterly: Stage of treatment waiting times - Inpatients, day cases and new outpatients quarter ending 30 September 2023 - NHS waiting times - stage of treatment - Publications - Public Health Scotland

We are working to ensure lessons identified from our policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic are put in place and that policy across government is better able to respond to the next pandemic. This includes clear responsibilities for preparedness and response; to include NHS resilience, Scottish Resilience (through SGORR), and cross-Scottish Government policy consideration of our existing plans, drawing on learnings including the UK Chief Medical Officers Technical report on the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK and Public Health Scotland’s National Incident Management Team reporting.

We are working with the UK Government and other administrations to strengthen the capabilities and countermeasures required to address future pandemics, including retaining stockpiles of PPE and the purchase of vaccines and medicines. We have established a Standing Committee on Pandemic Preparedness which provided interim recommendations on future pandemic preparedness in August 2022. We anticipate that the Standing Committee on Pandemic Preparedness will provide its final report in the summer 2024 for consideration.

We are committed to responding to both the UK and Scottish Covid-19 inquiries, as learning lessons from the pandemic is vital to prepare for the future.