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Through the National Drugs Mission, the Scottish Government is investing £250 million over the life of the Parliament to save and improve lives by expanding capacity in and improving access to treatment and support, both in the community and in residential rehabilitation. For the first time this year we will have data on the number of veterans accessing drug and alcohol treatment services, using the new Drug and Alcohol Information System (DAISy). We will use this data to inform our work to better meet the needs of veterans who use drugs to support them to achieve their recovery goals.

In relation to veterans healthcare, the Scottish Government has developed a scheme to help General Practices to identify and recognise the circumstances of veterans and their families . This is currently in the pilot phase of the programme.

In addition, the application form for Adult Disability Payment asks clients about their possible entitlement to Armed Forces Independence Payment, War Pensioners’ Mobility Supplement and War Pension Constant Attendance Allowance. Where appropriate, clients are then directed to Veterans UK for further advice.

We are also engaging with Scotland’s Housing Network’s Local Housing Strategy Group to encourage local authorities to identify the housing needs of the veterans and Armed Forces community. This will include local authorities sharing examples of best practice.

Finally, during 2022, the Scottish Government supported the UK Government work to undertake a scoping study for provision of digital verification of veteran status and contributed to the project’s Discovery Phase. We will continue to support the work as it progresses which will make it easier for all veterans to identify as such when accessing services and support.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-13853 on 26 January 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

I refer the member to the Scottish Government’s publications webpage. You can find the clinical leadership guidance here: Cancer workforce: clinical leadership guidance - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) . This has been cascaded across all regional cancer networks and amongst the Cancer Managers. In addition, presentations on clinical leadership have occurred across the regional cancer network steering groups.

The NHS National Ethnic Minority Forum (EMF) was established in April 2021 and aims amplify the voices of ethnic minority staff across the health service and tackle issues of systemic racism. EMF members also use their expertise to shape policy and practice in areas such as the Leading to Change Programme. We continue to work closely with the EMF on their priorities for 2023-24:

• the development of a ‘How to Talk about Race’ in the workplace guide
• considering support for staff reporting incidents of racial abuse/harassment
• supporting the development of anti-racism training resources for staff (an action that Scottish Government are taking forward).

Finally, I had the pleasure of attending an in-person meeting of the EMF on the 5 th October 2022. I made it clear that I will continue to actively support the chair and members in delivering their aims objectives.

Extensive work has taken place to develop projections for the health and social care workforce, including engagement with stakeholders to understand different user needs, and actively including these in the specification for the workforce projections.

This piece of work has and will take into account where appropriate the (a) three year workforce plans and (b) the Medium term financial framework as the work develops.

We aim to set out high level conclusions from projections in the coming months. Clearly, these projections are iterative and will respond to and change depending on emerging evidence and data including the impacts of AI on demand and capacity in the workforce.

This is a matter for the Scottish Social Services Council. The information requested is not held centrally.

The Connecting Scotland programme aims to ensure that people in Scotland have access to digital services by providing them with opportunities to access and utilise devices, connectivity, skills, and support effectively. To date, the Scottish Government has committed over £48m to Connecting Scotland, through the Programme for Government and Winter Package for Social Support.

We support veterans across our housing legislation. We published Social Housing Allocations in Scotland – A Practice Guide in 2019, to ensure that social landlords have an allocation policy that complies with all relevant legislation and statutory guidance. The guide provides clarity for social landlords about giving priority to Service leavers. The guidance also reinforces the need for social landlords to have clear information and housing options in place for all applicants, including veterans.

We amended legislation so that, from 1 July 2019, where the landlord is a charity providing accommodation to veterans, a private residential tenancy agreement will not apply. This will ensure that veterans specific accommodation in the private rented sector can continue to be used, ensuring that a veteran may be offered temporary accommodation for a period of rehabilitation and training, or permanent accommodation in line with the organisation’s charitable purpose and the needs of the veterans.

There is a statutory requirement on local authorities to produce a Local Housing Strategy that sets out its strategy, priorities and plans for the delivery of housing and related service. In September 2019 we published refreshed Local Housing Strategy guidance which encourages Local Authorities to fully consider the housing requirements of the Armed Forces community. The guidance has also been strengthened to encourage appropriate engagement with relevant organisations, such as Veterans Scotland, to better understand the needs of the Armed Forces community when developing Local Housing Strategies.

Scotland has some of the strongest homelessness legislation in the world and all local authorities have a legal duty to provide support to anyone at risk of homelessness, including veterans. We are also proposing new homelessness prevention duties, to be included in a forthcoming Housing Bill. These will include new duties on public bodies to ‘ask and act’ about housing situations and a change to existing legislation to allow local authorities to act at an earlier stage to prevent homelessness. Our approach is based around the principles of shared public responsibility, earlier intervention across systems and more choice and control for people over their housing options, which will include the veterans population

We are also taking action to make improvements across the rented sector that will progress the right to an adequate home and deliver our vision for Housing to 2040.

63% of respondents for whom health was a relevant concern told us that their ability to access health services was much better or a little better after receiving support from Connecting Scotland. 36% of respondents told us that their ability to access health services hadn’t changed and 1.4% said that access was worse or much worse.

If this result was reflected across the entire Connecting Scotland cohort of over 60000 people receiving devices, we could estimate that around 38,000 of those would have experienced some improvement in accessing healthcare services.

Overall this result indicates a positive impact of Connecting Scotland support on people’s ability to access the health services they need. It may be that respondents who felt there had been ‘no change’ in this respect already had a routine means of accessing the healthcare services non-digital channels (e.g. ordering repeat prescriptions over the phone). With more and more digitisation of healthcare service touchpoints being implemented in order to create efficiencies and save money it is likely that the numbers of people using their Connecting Scotland device and internet connection for this purpose will show an increase with time.

Here are some of the things that Connecting Scotland users have told us about how it has benefited them to use their device and internet connection to access health services:

“Allowing very important near me medical calls”

“Being able to access health services much easier, including managing appointments and medicines.”

“It has allowed us to do more things and stayed connected to appointments within the NHS, so I've been able to attend my hospital appointments via the tablet and it allows me to see things on a bigger screen than a small mobile phone (I have bad vision).”

(Aggregated survey data for phases 1 and 2 of Connecting Scotland. There were 1174 responses overall for whom access to health services was relevant.)