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To support health and care staff, the Scottish Government is working alongside the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre, NHS Boards and social care organisations to promote use of our national decision support platform, The Right Decision Service .

On the subject of workforce skills, I refer the member to the answer to questions S6W-14125, S6W-14142, S6W-14143, S6W-14150 and S6W-14151 on 2 February 2023.

Scottish Government is involved in the Accelerated National Implementation Adoption pathway. Set up to greater facilitate a company’s idea through to implementation.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information. This is a matter for NHS Education for Scotland (NES).

Digital Health and Care provides funding to DHI which in turn supports enterprises of assorted sizes to develop ideas and solutions that can be applied in health and care settings. We support DHI with their industry leadership group which meets with medium sized organisations for input and feedback.

Non-Executive Board members are required to undertake mandatory training at local level as a part of their local induction process. This is set out in the Director Letter DL(2019)21 - Induction process for Non-Executive Board Members . In addition, NHS Education for Scotland has a range of learning material available to Board Members. Current eLearning modules include: “Finance”; “Audit and Risk”; and, “Equality and the Role of Board Members in Meeting the Public Sector Duty”. These modules, whilst not mandatory, are recommended.

The impact of digital technology on the health and care workforce has been considered in several reports, such as the Topol Review commissioned by NHS England The Topol Review — NHS Health Education England (hee.nhs.uk) .

In general terms, digital technology can support the workforce in the delivery of care, free up capacity reducing the administrative burden and open up opportunities for new models of care and new ways of working. The workforce already works in the digital age, and digital technology will continue to augment and enhance the person-centred nature of health and social care services.

The Scottish Government is committed to developing digital skills for all staff across health and care, and ensuring that we embed digital leadership at all levels to enable digital service transformation. As part of our commitments in the Digital Health and Care Strategy’s Delivery Plan 2022-23 we are developing an Action Plan to articulate the range of learning and development opportunities more clearly, identify gaps and document outcomes. The Digital Health and Care Leadership Programme led by NHS Education for Scotland and sponsored by the Scottish Government supports staff to influence digital health and care in their organisations through strategic leadership, opportunities for learning, collaborating, and networking with others to maximise the use of technology to benefit service delivery within their organisations. The Programme is open to staff in NHS Scotland, social care, housing and the third sector, and will increase capacity in digital leadership, encouraging innovation in services and cross-organisation learning and development.

The Scottish Government continues to work closely with the above bodies to ensure Scotland is maximising the potential of Digital Health and Care. We have developed Scotland's first data strategy for health and social care input from these bodies and are in the process of enhancing our role in innovation through work with the Accelerated National Innovation Adoption pathway.

The Scottish Government does not hold this information. This is a matter for NHS Education for Scotland (NES).

Our commitment in the Digital Health and Care Strategy is to work with these organisations, and others, to realise the potential of digital health and care, not necessarily to provide additional investment.

However, please see the below response in respect of funding that is provided, covering the period of April 2021 to December 2022:

Scottish Government invested £1,306,888 in support of the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI). To confirm, the aquaculture and construction innovation centres are not relevant to digital health and care investment. For Precision Medicine Scotland, there was no spend in 2021-22 and 2022-23 figures are not available due to the financial year not yet being complete. Scottish Innovation Centres is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (SFC), detail on SFC spending is available publicly on their website Funding announcements (sfc.ac.uk) . Given the various funding streams from across Scottish Government to Innovation Organisations it would not be possible to quantify those funds in support of digital health and care related work only.

Scottish Government funding to Public Health Scotland is set out in each year’s Scottish Budget which is publicly available on the Scottish Government’s website: Scottish Budget - gov.scot ( www.gov.scot ) Detail on PHS spending is set out within the organisation’s annual accounts which are publicly available on their website. Additionally, we directly provided £1,597,088 in support of various programmes of work relating to Digital Health and Care.

The Scottish Government has allocated £1,132,500 for its strategic work programme to build cyber resilience across sectors, as well as an initial spend during 2022/23 on setting up the Scottish Cyber Coordination Centre.

Since 2021-22, we have provided £2.45 million funding to the Scotland 5G Centre which has contributed to the development and implementation of digital health and care 5G use cases.

The Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD) – In 2021-22 Golden Jubilee/CfSD received allocations from planned care of £5.4m - £3m in programme funding and £2.4m in staffing costs at CfSD. The 2022-23 figures are not available due to the financial year not yet being complete.