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The Scottish Government recognises the important role of primary care teams in delivering care to patients living with advanced, serious illness or at the end of lives, and their loved ones.

The Daffodil Standards for GPs provides a useful resource for practice teams who wish to improve on the care that they provide to people near the end of life. We will consider if there is more we can do to ensure all GP practices are aware of the standards and this resource.

Prescribing data is not associated with diagnostic data in the Prescribing Information System (PIS) dataset or in the Hospital Medicine Use Database (HMUD). It is reasonable to make the assumption that the prescription of these drugs indicates the patients are being treated for advanced Parkinson’s disease.

The number of people prescribed apomorphine and duodopa in Primary Care in the 12 months up to November 2018 is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Number of people prescribed apomorphine and duodopa in the community in Scotland in the 12 months up to November 2018.

SIGN is part of the Evidence Directorate of Healthcare Improvement Scotland and receives core funding from Healthcare Improvement Scotland. It is editorially independent from Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the Scottish Government.

Any group or individual can propose or request a review of a SIGN guideline by completing a proposal form and returning it to the SIGN Executive. Guideline topics are selected on the basis of burden of disease, the existence of variation in practice, and the potential to improve outcomes. There is a defined process that SIGN follows to support proposers to develop their proposals and then selection criteria that aid the Guideline Programme Advisory Group to decide which proposals to accept for guideline development. The SIGN Council ratifies these accepted proposals.

The information requested is not held centrally. However, the number of hospital discharges where a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease was recorded, per year, for the last 10 years in Scotland, is available.

Note that the same person may be counted more than once in these figures, and that they do not include patients with Parkinson’s disease who were not admitted to hospital during this period.

Number of discharges from an acute hospital with a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease recorded, by year, Scotland, 2009-18*.

Since starting inspections in September 2009, a total of 295 safety
and cleanliness inspections have been undertaken in hospitals by
the Healthcare Environment Inspectorate. This is broken down as
follows:

This information is not held centrally. The member may wish to consider contacting individual Health Boards to obtain this information.

Since 1999 over 67,000 cancer patients have accessed clinical trials in Scotland, broken down by NHS Board as shown in the following tables:

Sickness Absence rates for all staff directly employed by NHSScotland are published annually for year ending 31 March. Figures for NHSScotland, and for individual health boards are available from 2002 and 2005 respectively.

This information can be found on the Workforce web page of NHS Scotland’s Information Services Division at https://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/Workforce/Publications/2018-06-05/Sickness_Absence_M2018.xls .

Once the Respiratory Care Action Plan is finalised we will have a better understanding of the financial challenges and opportunities lying ahead and this will inform funding decisions.

The Scottish Government recognises the importance of effective asset management and investment planning to ensure that the health and care estate and supporting services are fit for purpose and capable of adapting to and encouraging new models of care delivery.

Our Capital Investment Strategy (CIS) will be brought to Parliament before the end of the financial year. The CIS will take a broad overview of required investment across primary and community care facilities, acute hospital infrastructure, digital technology, and medical equipment and will set out the further steps we will take to support all boards to continue to improve and maintain their estate and asset base.