The table on the number of Did Not Attends (DNA's) for New Outpatient Appointments in each NHS Health Board of Treatment from 2007-2018 is available from the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (Bib. number 60855)

Please note that DNA recording for NHS Lothian from May 2018 is incorrect resulting in lower than expected DNA figures for 2018.

The Modern Outpatient Programme is working within NHS Boards to test a ‘Smarter Booking’ system which will allow patients to re-engage with secondary care specialist services and to cancel appointments on-line. The system would also allow short notice and same day cancellations to be notified to individuals on the waiting list thus reducing the impact of wasted appointments.

I refer the member to the answer to question S5W-24098 on 22 July 2019 . All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at http://www.parliament.scot/parliamentarybusiness/28877.aspx .

NHSScotland has already made significant progress in reducing the emissions from its estate. At the end of 2018-19, greenhouse gas emissions were down by more than 61.6% on 1990 levels.

Measures in place to see these reductions include:

• the eradication of the use of coal, and significant reduction in the use of heavy fuel oil;
• upgrading energy centres to take advantage of latest energy efficiency technologies;
• upgrading lighting across their estates to enable the use of high efficiency LED lighting;
• the procurement of a national contract with WarpIt to enable Boards to reuse office equipment across their estate and within other public and third sector estates; and
• the development of a plastics hierarchy to assist the movement towards a single-source recyclable plastic for use across all NHS applications.

The figures in the following table represent the number of NHS funded operations that have been undertaken in independent hospitals in each year since 1999 and reported to ISD.

This Government is absolutely committed to a publicly-owned, and operated NHS. So the people of Scotland continue to have free timely access to health services.

Through the Waiting Times Improvement Plan, activity undertaken by the Independent Sector has been brought under a National contract. This will reduce costs, maximise effectiveness and enable value for money and performance to be clearly evidenced. The new approach will only be used as required while NHS capacity is expanded over the longer term.

No information is collected specifically on how many people have been diagnosed with dementia in each year since 2007, either nationally or broken down by NHS Board.

The table below, published by NHS National Services Scotland, shows the number of formal dementia diagnosis registrations on the GP Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) Dementia Register, for years 2006-07 to 2015-16.

The year-on-year rise of registration numbers does not directly correlate with all of the new diagnosis registrations in each year, as the overall number is also affected by the removal of registrations as individuals die. This data underpinned NHS Board-level performance against the Scottish Government’s national dementia diagnosis HEAT target between 2007-2011.

The overall QOF was replaced by the GP Clusters approach as the mechanism to help drive improvement in primary care, effective from 1 April 2016.

The Scottish Government’s Estimated Annual Diagnosed Dementia Incidence report (published in 2016) estimates that almost 20,000 dementia cases will be diagnosed per year by 2020.

ALISS is an on-line directory service, openly accessible to all, which lists community assets and connects people with sources of support in their area to help them to manage their own health conditions effectively. The directory includes sources of support in the community across the full range of health and care services, not just mental health. It does not record information about referrals made by GPs. Information on the number of referrals broken down by NHS board is therefore not available.

Information on the number of prescription issued and uncollected within the time periods requested is not readily available.

Each community pharmacy contractor will have a standard operating procedure for dispensing medicine which will include how to deal with uncollected items. However, it is common practice for any medicines not collected and which have not left the premises to be returned to stock for re-use if appropriate, and no reimbursement payment is made for the medicine in this case. Prescription forms for uncollected medicines are then passed by community pharmacies to NHS National Services Scotland Practitioner and Counter Fraud Services for processing, endorsed by the pharmacy as “item not collected”.

The reasons why a prescription item may be uncollected are multifaceted. However, a new medicine intervention support tool has been introduced allowing community pharmacists to provide structured and tailored support to patients. This should increase adherence to new medicines, in turn reducing the number of uncollected items due to poor adherence.

The Scottish Government has not issued any specific guidance on the reuse of uncollected prescriptions. Practitioner and Counter Fraud Services and Community Pharmacy Scotland publish Endorsing Guidance which provides guidance on how to endorse prescriptions for any items not collected.

This information is not held centrally. It may be available on request from health boards.

The number of admissions from care homes to NHS hospitals for each NHS Board is shown in the following table, by calendar year. It should be noted that an individual patient may be counted more than once if they were admitted from a care home on multiple separate occasions.

The Scottish Government does not hold the information in the manner requested. Prior to June 2015 arrangements for pharmacists in GP practices were local agreements put in place at Board level. However, from June 2015 the Primary Care Fund was allocated to Boards to recruit pharmacists with advanced clinical skills training, or those undertaking the training, to GP practices.

Therefore data for centrally funded posts exists from June 2015 onwards.

As at March 2019, Boards indicated they have recruited 320.2 wte pharmacists and 90.6 wte technicians to GP practices. The breakdown by Board is as follows :