Personal devices owned and used by Cabinet Secretaries and Ministers do not have access to the Scottish Government’s corporate IT network or applications.

Ministers are briefed on best practice in respect of maintaining confidentiality of Scottish Government data when entering office or when a substantial change takes place.

Recently, Ministers have had dedicated briefings on Spear Phishing and the use of certain platforms. This has been done in partnership with the NCSC and Government Security Group.

We are working with NHS Boards to maximise current resources and productivity to reduce long waits, which have been exacerbated by the impacts of the global pandemic. We remain committed to reducing waiting times year on year across the NHS as set out in the Policy Prospectus .

We are working to implement the commitments of our Neurological Care and Support – National Framework for Action 2020-25 , to improve the provision of co-ordinated health and social care and support, develop sustainable workforce models and ensure high standards of person-centred care. Since October 2020, we have provided £2.6 million to fund innovative projects working to improve outcomes for people living with neurological conditions.

Whilst the Framework is not condition specific, it covers issues affecting people with all types of neurological conditions, including dystonia. The Scottish Government is working in partnership with NHS24 to update accessible public-facing information about dystonia , and other neurological conditions, for the NHS Inform website.

We recognise that uncertainty while waiting can have an impact on health and wellbeing. That is why we have launched a new Waiting Well Hub on NHS Inform to provide patients with information to support their health and wellbeing while waiting for health and social care services. This includes information on physical and mental health, as well as advice about practical issues like money worries.

The Centre for Sustainable Delivery was commissioned by the Scottish Government to establish Specialty Delivery Groups in order to support, innovate and develop high quality services across Scotland. Significant progress has been made to release outpatient activity through redesign, with over 100,000 appointments released through Active Clinical Referral Triage (ACRT) and Patient-Initiated Review (PIR), well ahead of the target of 50,000 for 2023-24.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-23817 on 8 January 2024. 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 Scottish Government is clear that stoma patients should expect an equitable level of care wherever they reside in Scotland, and the responses received from the recently concluded information gathering exercise on the provision of stoma care and stoma specialist nurse coverage across Scotland's 14 territorial health boards will be an important step in achieving that when it is considered by the Scottish Executive Nurse Directors (SEND) in early 2024.

There is no specific provision for long COVID research in the Scottish Government Budget for 2024-25.

Within the Scottish Government, funding of Health and Care Research comes under the remit of the Chief Scientist Office (CSO).

The CSO's Translational Clinical Studies (TCS) Committee and the Health Improvement, Protection and Services Research (HIPS) Committee each meet twice per year to consider funding applications. Details of the application process are published on the CSO website.

https://www.cso.scot.nhs.uk/grant-funding/response-mode-funding-schemes/

Applications on long-COVID are welcomed. In common with all other applications, these would go through the CSO's standard independent peer review process.

To date 2 research projects on long COVID have been funded via this route:

HIPS/23/08

Long COVID And Frontline Public Service Occupations: Impacts On Employees And Organisations

University of Stirling

Dr Alice MacLean/Professor Kate Hunt

Funding awarded £296,960

HIPS/22/33

Caring for Long COVID in Primary Care: Using Patient and Professional Experience to Build Co-Designed Solutions. A Participatory, Mixed Methods Study.

University of Glasgow

Professor Catherine O’Donnell

Funding awarded £297,900

Through UK-wide funding agreements, researchers based in Scotland are able to access the following research funding programmes administered by the National Institute for Health & Care Research (NIHR):

Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME)

Evidence Synthesis

Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR)

Health Technology Assessment (HTA)

Invention for Innovation (i4i)

Programme Development Grants (PDG)

Programme Grants for Applied Research (PGfAR)

Public Health Research (PHR)

Research for Social Care (RfSC)

Within their individual remits, the above programmes can consider applications for research in long COVID.

CSO is working with the health research community in Scotland to ensure awareness of these opportunities and to maximise the number of high quality applications from Scotland to these research funding programmes going forward.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-23323 on‎ 11 December 2023. 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 Scottish Government has listened to concerns that independent hospices have about the recruitment and retention of staff, and will continue to do so.

As Integration Joint Boards (IJBs) are responsible for the governance, planning, and resourcing of adult palliative care services, including hospices, using the integrated budget under their control, we will continue to work with Chief Officers to support longer term sustainable planning and commissioning for the hospice sector, and will work jointly to develop a national guidance framework to support and improve consistency of local planning and commissioning.

The Scottish Government wants cancer patients to be treated as close to home as clinically appropriate. However, as treatments for some cancers become more complex and expensive, it becomes impossible to deliver them in every location.

Cancer services require a highly specialised workforce. In order to ensure the future sustainability of our services, we published our ten-year Cancer Strategy in which we have committed to modelling cancer workforce requirements and continue to grow the number of training places to expand our workforce.

As part of the Scottish Government’s work to develop a sustainable healthcare workforce, we continue to look for opportunities to increase levels of recruitment and retention of healthcare staff in rural areas and will develop a Rural Workforce Recruitment Strategy by the end of 2024. This will support employers to ensure that the health and social care needs of people, including women with ovarian cancer who live in rural communities, are met.

The Scottish Government is committed to working with NHS Boards to deliver our ambition to protect, stabilise and recover planned care. This includes maximising theatre productivity, optimising capacity and regional working.

Regional cancer networks have undertaken, and continue to undertake, improvement work to reduce ovarian cancer surgery waits. This improvement work includes increasing surgery provision and regional support.

The Scottish Cancer Network will be establishing a new National Ovarian Cancer Clinical Network, which will work to ensure equity of access to treatment for all women with ovarian cancer in Scotland.

The Scottish Government’s position has been, and remains, focussed on the ‘whole cancer pathway’ which is why the 62-day standard is in place. This covers the period from an urgent suspicion of cancer (USC) referral from a primary care clinician to the start of treatment for Scotland’s most common cancers, including ovarian cancer.

The latest published statistics (July-September 2023) show the median time for an ovarian cancer patient from USC referral to first treatment is 51 days. Once a decision to treat is made, the median wait for treatment is 12 days for ovarian cancer patients.

Scottish Government officials meet with Boards’ Cancer Management Teams fortnightly (monthly for Island Boards) to ensure patients are moving timeously through these pathways and are treated as quickly as possible. Where cancer pathway challenges are identified, innovative solutions are explored and best practice shared from other areas.

We are investing £40 million over five years to support cancer services, with £10 million provided to Boards in 2023-24 alone.