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Questions and answers

Parliamentary questions can be asked by any MSP to the Scottish Government or the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body. The questions provide a means for MSPs to get factual and statistical information.

Written questions must be answered within 10 working days (20 working days during recess)
Other questions such as Topical, Portfolio, General and First Minister's Question Times are taken in the Chamber

Urgent Questions aren't included in the Question and Answers search. There is a SPICe fact sheet listing Urgent and emergency questions.

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Question reference: S6O-00779

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 16 February 2022
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 24 February 2022

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to the reported comments of Glasgow City Council's new Executive Director of Education regarding reinstating the Scottish Survey of Literacy and Numeracy.

Question reference: S6W-06218

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 04 February 2022
Submitting member has a registered interest.
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 16 February 2022

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will assess the feasibility of conducting stethoscope checks and placing echocardiograms in community care settings in order to improve the detection and diagnosis of heart valve disease.

Where it is clinically appropriate to do so, patients of all ages will be examined with a stethoscope to listen for breathing and heart sounds. They may also have ECG electrical recordings of their heart rate, blood tests and have access to other investigations such as echocardiograms, rhythm monitors and blood pressure recordings, should these be required.

The Heart Disease Action Plan (2021) outlines our commitment to exploring innovative models of care for the diagnosis of heart disease, including a focus on improving access to echocardiography in the most appropriate setting for local needs.

Question reference: S6W-06217

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 04 February 2022
Submitting member has a registered interest.
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 16 February 2022

To ask the Scottish Government how it will support the wider roll-out of the Glasgow-based OPERA study on heart failure diagnosis across all NHS boards.

The Heart Disease Action Plan outlines our commitment to exploring innovative models of care for cardiac diagnosis. Through the Heart Disease Action Plan Funding call in 2021, we provided funding for a second NHS board to implement aspects of the OPERA study within its local service provision.

The learning from this will be fed into ongoing work by the Centre for Sustainable Delivery to better understand the opportunities for implementation of OPERA in other NHS Boards, through pathfinder work via the new Accelerated National Innovation Adoption pathway.

Question reference: S6W-06219

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Friday, 04 February 2022
Submitting member has a registered interest.
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 16 February 2022

To ask the Scottish Government how it will adopt the recommendations in the Heart Valve Voice report, State of the Nation, on reducing variation in heart valve disease treatment and waiting times for heart valve disease detection, diagnosis and treatment.

Key recommendations in the Heart Valve Voice report State of the Nation included:

1) collecting standardised data for HVD.

2) focus on HVD in campaigns to raise awareness of disease in women.

3) developing an optimal patient pathway for HVD.

4) improving access to echocardiography.

1) The Heart Disease Action Plan (2021) clearly sets out our priority for the effective use of high-quality, standardised data to support clinical decision-making, understand patient outcomes and enable better service-planning. In April 2021, we commissioned Public Health Scotland to develop the Scottish Cardiac Audit Programme. We have committed more than £1.5m over five years to support this transformative change in access to, and use of, data to drive improvement in cardiac services.

2) We have made clear commitments to tackling the inequalities faced by women with heart disease in our Women’s Health Plan, including the launch of an information campaign on women’s heart health. Future development of work in this area will be informed by the lived experience of women with heart disease.

3) Priority 2 within the Heart Disease Action Plan makes clear our commitment to developing nationally agreed pathways of care for all cardiac conditions. This work is underway.

4) We recognise the importance of improving access to echocardiography and are taking action to address this. Through the Heart Disease Action Plan funding call in 2021, we provided funding for a project exploring how to improve access to echocardiography.

Question reference: S6O-00729

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Wednesday, 02 February 2022
Submitting member has a registered interest.
Current Status: Taken in the Chamber on 9 February 2022

To ask the Scottish Government whether it will meet its chronic pain clinic waiting time target during the current reporting quarter, 1 January to 31 March.

Question reference: S6W-05777

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 20 January 2022
Submitting member has a registered interest.
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 28 January 2022

To ask the Scottish Government whether it is the case that the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) Yellow card system, including the Genpact UK artificial intelligence tool, is used to monitor and process COVID-19 vaccine adverse drug reactions occurring in Scotland and, if it is not the case, what monitoring system is in use.

The safety of all vaccines and medicines is monitored by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) on a UK-wide basis. This includes reports from the Yellow Card Scheme which allows health professionals and patients across the UK to flag up suspected adverse reactions to any vaccine or medicine, as well as reports from worldwide use and on-going scientific evidence.

The MHRA has a range of resources and technology to support the safety monitoring of the COVID-19 vaccination programme. The use of artificial intelligence is one element of that and helps to reduce the amount of manual coding for each report to the Yellow Card Scheme on COVID-19 vaccines, thereby saving resource in processing cases and ensuring they are more rapidly available for scientific analysis. The tool is not used for assessment of data, but to help ensure that all information from reports is well structured to support analysis and is subject to robust quality assessment.

Concerns over the safety of vaccines are not taken lightly. Please be assured that the MHRA keep the safety of all vaccines under close and continual review, and would take appropriate regulatory action if new evidence emerged which called into question the safety of any vaccines currently in use in Scotland.

Question reference: S6W-05160

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 16 December 2021
Submitting member has a registered interest.
Current Status: Answered by Maree Todd on 23 December 2021

To ask the Scottish Government, in light of the publication of the NICE guidelines for adults with cerebral palsy in January 2019, what action it is taking to enable the publication of the equivalent SIGN guidelines for adults with cerebral palsy in Scotland.

Question reference: S6W-04932

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 09 December 2021
Submitting member has a registered interest.
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 23 December 2021

To ask the Scottish Government what assessment it has made of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the detection of atrial fibrillation.

We have not made a direct assessment of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the detection of atrial fibrillation. However, we regularly assess statistics on Covid-19’s impact on cardiovascular services more widely to inform our work.

Public Health Scotland Statistics on COVID-19’s impact on the health care system including cardiovascular procedures can be found at:

https://scotland.shinyapps.io/phs-covid-wider-impact/

To address the wider impacts of the pandemic our NHS Recovery Plan, backed by over £1bn of investment, sets out our plans for health and care over the next five years. Through the plan we will take forward our aim of increasing NHS capacity by at least 10% as quickly as possible to address the backlog of care and meet the ongoing healthcare needs for people across the country.

Question reference: S6W-04931

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 09 December 2021
Submitting member has a registered interest.
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 23 December 2021

To ask the Scottish Government what progress has been made on implementing the recommendations in the Cross-Party Group on Heart Disease and Stroke report, A Focus on Atrial Fibrillation in Scotland, published in January 2018.

The Scottish Government published our Heart Disease Action Plan in March 2021. This sets out a number of actions to enable us to achieve our vision of minimising preventable heart disease and ensuring equitable and timely access to diagnosis, treatment and care for people with heart disease. It is relevant to a number of the recommendations of the CPG inquiry report.

Within Priority 1 of the Action Plan, there is a focus on improving the detection, diagnosis and management of risk factor conditions, including atrial fibrillation. Work is underway to deliver the commitments outlined.

In particular, the Scottish Primary Care Information Resource (SPIRE) is developing reporting on atrial fibrillation. This will allow GP practices to monitor patients on particular medications and make sure they are getting the right follow-up care.

The Action Plan also makes commitments to addressing the challenges facing the cardiac physiology workforce. Work is progressing on this. Furthermore, we are progressing commitments in the Integrated Health and Social Care Workforce Plan (2019) for Scotland to promote recruitment of cardiac physiologists over the next 3-5 years into Scientist Training Programmes and Practitioner BSC Programmes.

The CPG inquiry report also identifies the importance of improving access to data to drive improvement. In April 2021 we commissioned Public Health Scotland to develop the Scottish Cardiac Audit Programme. Extensive clinical and patient engagement is currently underway to develop the audit. Two key work streams within that engagement are atrial fibrillation and cardiac devices.

Question reference: S6W-04933

Asked by: Sandesh Gulhane, MSP for Glasgow, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
Date lodged: Thursday, 09 December 2021
Submitting member has a registered interest.
Current Status: Answered by Humza Yousaf on 23 December 2021

To ask the Scottish Government what data it or the NHS has on the (a) prevention of venous thromboembolism (VTE) and (b) management of patients at risk of recurrent VTE.