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The Scottish Government hopes to be able to announce the successful bids jointly with the UK Government soon.

The Scottish Government is committed to ensuring that NHS Scotland has a skilled and sustainable workforce, we work in partnership with NHS Boards who are responsible for taking decisions about the configuration of midwifery services, commensurate with their local population needs.

We have taken a range of measures to support midwifery workforce supply, having grown the number of funded places on undergraduate midwifery programmes in Scotland by 20% over the last decade, to 301 funded places in 2022. Additionally, we offer a comprehensive and competitive package of student support, which is the best in the UK. In January 2022, we welcomed students from across Scotland on to a new, shortened midwifery training pathway at Edinburgh Napier University. These students will qualify as midwives in 20 months whilst continuing to work in their home regions, including in Scotland's remote and rural health boards.

In addition to our investment in education and training, we are providing direct recruitment support to all health boards across Scotland, through coordinated national marketing activity and support for ongoing international recruitment, including £8m to support the recruitment of up to 750 nurses, midwives and AHPs announced on 04 October 2022. We continue to look for opportunities to increase levels of recruitment and retention of healthcare staff in rural areas and have committed to undertaking further activity on remote and rural recruitment and retention, under the auspices of the National Health and Social Care Workforce Strategy.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) receives monthly data from most NHS Boards on the number of patients covered by the 18 weeks Referral to Treatment (RTT) standard seen within each specialty, including audiology. Due to the aggregate nature of this data collection, the requested detail on average length of wait and age are not available.

However, Table 1 shows the total number of patients seen and the number that waited over 18 weeks to be seen for audiology services across NHS Scotland, from January 2014 to December 2021 – the latest complete calendar year. This includes all patients reported as seen on the 18-week RTT pathway for audiology. Please note, almost all patients on this pathway are not admitted for treatment and their journey ends after seeing an audiologist in an outpatient setting.

Due to the complexities of 18 week RTT local data collection and reporting, the length of wait cannot be accurately measured by the Board of treatment for all patients. The impact of which for audiology is reflected in the number of unknown waits reported in the following table.

Table 1: Total patients seen and number of patients that waited over 18 weeks, January 2014 – December 2021, NHS Scotland, Audiology.

The Scottish Government published a summary of progress towards implementation of the 2018 GMS Contract and its associated Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in June 2022:

Primary care improvement plans: summary of implementation progress - March 2022 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

As the publication sets out, there are now 3,220 whole time equivalent (WTE) healthcare professionals, such as pharmacists, mental health workers and physiotherapists, recruited into multi-disciplinary teams supporting general practice teams. Of this total, nearly 700 are working in areas with remote and rural communities.

It should, however, be noted that it is not expected that all GP practices in Scotland will take up these NHS Board provided services. As service delivery models are designed specifically according to local population needs, there are variations in approach across the country.

The next progress update will be published in summer 2023.

We are also actively incentivising remote and rural General Practice in several ways. The Golden Hello scheme offers a one-off bursary of £10,000 to every GP taking up an eligible post in a remote and rural area.

Furthermore, ScotGEM is a four-year graduate-entry medical degree which began in 2018, with a focus on rural medicine and healthcare improvement, supporting graduates to choose careers in general practice. Students on the ScotGEM course are offered a 'return of service' bursary, a grant worth up to £16,000 in total, in exchange for working in NHS Scotland for up to four years. 70 places will be offered on the course from 2022-23 onwards, following an increase of 15 places in line with the recent PfG commitment.

The Scottish Government is also working closely with partners including the Scottish Rural Medicine Collaborative (SRMC) to find solutions for remote and rural GP recruitment. The four rural boards in the north of Scotland have piloted an innovative recruitment campaign called Rediscover The Joy (RTJ). RTJ aims to recruit experienced GPs to provide support for remote and rural practices and, to date, this has been an initiative run in NHS Shetland, Orkney, Highland and Western Isles.

Cancer remains a priority for the Scottish Government with NHS Scotland continuing to prioritise urgent suspicion of cancer (USC) referrals and delivering high-quality care, in the safest possible way, to those who need it most. We’re continuing to invest in cancer pathways to improve waiting times, including through up-skilling nurses and have begun testing the use of Single Points of Contact in cancer pathways to support patients from the point of referral.

In addition, we have stood up a National Oncology Taskforce of NHS Board Chief Executives and Medical Directors to seek national solutions to ensure long term resilience of oncology services in Scotland.

(a) The number of people accepted onto pre-registration midwifery training courses since the 2016-17 academic year is shown in the following table:

Data showing the percentage of pre-registration students who were in the "inactive" training state on a three-year pre-registration midwifery programme over the last five years for which complete figures are available is found in the table below. “Inactive” refers to students who are neither in training nor have completed their programme – many students will return to their studies and go on to complete their programme.

The Scottish Government is committed to tackling health inequalities and providing access to the highest quality of care for all. We work across the clinical research system to ensure sponsors of clinical studies understand their ethical and legal responsibilities, including increasing equitable access to clinical trials. We recognise the benefits of innovative approaches to the future of clinical trials, including the opportunities presented by increased use of data and digital technologies, and learning from the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Place directors are not appointed - these roles are voluntary positions taken on by civil servants at deputy director and director level, alongside their day-to-day responsibilities. A list of current place directors and their local authority and Community Planning Partnership areas can be found on the Scottish Government website, under Community Planning [ Community planning - Improving public services - gov.scot (www.gov.scot) ].

Since 2007 the Scottish Government has retained, and subsequently deployed, any and all net underspends which have been available following the conclusion of the Final Outturn process at the end of each financial year. The mechanism for doing so is via the Scotland Reserve and previously the Budget Exchange Mechanism.

The amount of underspends arising from each year since 1999 was detailed in the answer to question S6W-09370 on 13 July 2022.

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