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The Scottish Government published its winter resilience plan on 4 October. This sets out a range of actions we are taking to support our health and social sector throughout the winter period - Health and social care: winter resilience overview 2022 to 2023 - gov.scot.

The COVID-19 Four Harms group continue to meet fortnightly to review and consider the overall threat level of Covid-19 in Scotland guided by evidence provided by the Chief Medical Officer. The group are ready to respond to any surge in infections, outbreaks or variant of concern and have contingency planning in place.

For all scenarios we know that effective and timely delivery of the seasonal flu and COVID-19 vaccines is crucial, and our winter vaccination programme is now well underway. As of 30th October 2022, 2,420,721 Autumn/Winter Vaccines have been administered in Scotland – 1,214,300 COVID-19 vaccines and 1,206,421 adult flu vaccines. Over 87% of older adult care home residents, and 80% of over-65s have received their COVID-19 booster thus far.

We continue to monitor RSV as part of the Public Health Scotland’s surveillance programme and currently have no evidence to suggest that we are facing an RSV epidemic this winter. NHS Board winter plans take into account the predicted surge of seasonal flu, RSV and Norovirus activity that can happen between October and March and have adequate resources in place to deal with potential outbreaks across this period.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-02957 on 12 October 2021 . 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 .

Table 1 shows the number of patients under the age of 16 with a recorded diagnosis of tooth decay who were admitted to hospital for a tooth extraction in (a) 2012 (b) 2016 and (c) 2021, in NHS (i) Ayrshire and Arran, and (ii) Greater Glasgow and Clyde.

Table 1:

  Source: SMR01, Public Health Scotland, extract: November 2022.

As committed to in the National Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care we will, for the first time, publish our high level indicative projections for the Health and Social Care Workforce.

As part of the development of the indicative workforce projections a Short Life Working Group, comprising of key stakeholders developed an initial specification for workforce projections. Development of any projections is complex with many interlinking factors and as such we will look to continue to build the complexity of our workforce projections over time. Initially we will include job families from across the health and social care sector and utilise data from existing workforce data sets. Unfortunately we currently do not hold national level workforce data on consultant hepatologists, liver nurse specialists and alcohol liaison nurses and are therefore unable to include these specialities in initial workforce projections beyond the level of nurse and medical job families.

As part of the strategy we have also committed to taking forward specific actions to improve how we gather, use and assess workforce data. This includes taking steps to improve the demographic data we collect and the analysis we undertake of data obtained at different geographic levels within our health and social care system. This work to improve workforce data will be done in concert with development of workforce projections and the continued development of these.

We awarded a contract through a competitive tender for independent VAT advice from Anderson Anderson & Brown LLP. AAB have been commissioned to provide advice and support to SG on VAT implications. This work is ongoing. We will engage with the wider sector and HMT prior to any decision being taken which would have a VAT impact.

We awarded a contract through a competitive tender for independent VAT advice from Anderson Anderson & Brown LLP. AAB have been commissioned to provide advice and support to Scottish Government employees on VAT implications, to produce an options paper exploring the VAT implications of different NCS scenarios, and to produce a final report on the considerations of VAT and eventual outcome. This work is ongoing.

We expect clinicians to adhere to current guidelines from authoritative sources such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). The NICE quality statement on surveillance for hepatocellular carcinoma, published in 2017, states that adults with cirrhosis should be offered six monthly surveillance for hepatocellular carcinoma. The European Association for the Study of the Liver published updated recommendations in the Journal of Hepatology in 2020.

After competitive tender, a contract was awarded to Anderson Anderson & Brown LLP to obtain expert independent advice on the implications of VAT on the NCS and associated Care Boards. No decisions have been made at this point and a full understanding of the impact of all options will be considered.

The Housing Need and Demand Assessment (HNDA) Tool contains a default count of households who are both overcrowded and concealed. The Scottish Government's Centre for Housing Market Analysis (CHMA) also publishes separate counts of overcrowded and concealed households which local authorities may choose to use. Alternatively, local authorities may choose to use local information about overcrowded and concealed households using sources such as waiting lists or local survey work, where they can evidence that this is robust.

Specific details are published as bespoke separate documents, as follows:

• Single count of overcrowded households and single count of concealed households (see Table 3)

Estimating concealed family rates with overcrowding using Scottish survey data (2016-2018) (www.gov.scot)

• Count of households who are both overcrowded and concealed (see Excel worksheet called ‘HoTOC’)

Housing Need and Demand Assessment (HNDA): tool 2020 - gov.scot (www.gov.scot)

Local authorities, as both the statutory housing and planning authority, are responsible for assessing housing requirements and set out priorities in their Local Housing Strategies.

The Housing Need and Demand Assessment Tool helps local authorities to access robust, quality assured data sets and to reduce the cost and complexity for local authorities in undertaking such assessments. The Tool is designed to use recognised national datasets and also provides flexibility to incorporate a variety of types of housing need where there is robust local information and evidenced policy drivers. Local authorities are able to augment this data with a range of additional sources including primary data where they have it.