Seòmar agus comataidhean

The Scottish Government is committed to a long term vision for active travel that encourages walking, cycling, public transport and car sharing in preference to single occupancy car use for movement of people, and encourages efficient and sustainable freight.

A range of programmes are underway to encourage more parents and carers to choose alternatives to using their car. This includes Sustrans’ Safer Routes to Schools programme, which is helping to fund and deliver improvements to school routes to make them safer and better places for people to walk and cycle. Cycling Scotland also runs the Bikeability programme which delivers training to school children to give them the skills and confidence needed to cycle safely to school.

The Scottish Government also provides local authorities with funds towards the provision of dedicated school transport and funded travel on public transport services for eligible pupils which also supports reduced use of cars.

The Scottish Government has put in place financial support packages, through emergency Covid Support Grants, paid at pre-Covid levels, paid to bus operators to provide and maintain essential bus services.

The National Bus Travel Concession Scheme for Young Persons will also enable all young people aged under 22 to become eligible for free bus travel throughout Scotland. Up to 930,000 young people could benefit from the scheme, which aims to encourage greater use of public transport and reduce reliance on cars.

We are committed to increasing residential rehabilitation placements and getting more women into treatment and recovery. This includes keeping families together when it is appropriate to do so.

£100 million of the additional £250 million funding announced as part of the National Mission will support further investment in - and expansion of - residential rehabilitation and associated aftercare over the next five years.

In May 2021, the Scottish Government launched two funds worth a combined £10 million; a £5 million Recovery Fund to support services to provide additional residential rehabilitation capacity, and a £5 million Improvement Fund to support improvements to services for outreach, treatment, rehabilitation and aftercare, with dedicated support for women.

Through these funds, we are open to considering a range of proposals to increase placements for residential rehabilitation - including dedicated mother and baby residential care units.

Work is also underway working with the Residential Rehabilitation Development Working Group to develop a best practice pathways guide into and from residential rehabilitation treatment, including pathways for women and families.

Lateral Flow Device (LFD) tests are approved for use by the MHRA, the UK's regulator of medicines and medical devices, responsible for ensuring their safety, quality and effectiveness. LFDs are all packaged with Instructions for Use, which are required by the MHRA to be easy to follow and available in a range of languages and formats. The Scottish Government has developed a range of resources in accordance with this.

The Scottish Government worked with NHS Inform to promote information on how to accurately take an LFD test. This included commissioning a video from Professor Jason Leitch with instructions on how to take the test. This has been translated into multiple languages including BSL, Arabic, Polish and Urdu, as have written instructions. The gov.scot site points to NHS Inform as the primary place to read the instructions.

Working with Young Scot, content was created that was aimed at children and young people on how to take an accurate LFD test, including a video from Dr Punam Krishan. A range of marketing assets have also been developed on how to do an LFD test, including posters for health and social care workers to share with local authorities and health boards.

Anyone who experiences any harm, injury, false positives or negatives, or difficulties in using the self-test device should report this to MHRA via the Coronavirus Yellow Card website, which helps identify issues which might not have previously been known that can then be addressed.

I appreciate how difficult postponement of treatment has been for people with chronic pain. This includes those who may have had their normal treatment paused, including injections to manage acute pain, owing to clinical concerns related to an increased risk of COVID-19 infection or severity during the pandemic. We have taken a number of steps to provide advice and support to people with chronic pain during the pandemic, and remain committed to ensuring that Health Boards resume a full range of specialist pain services as quickly as it is safe to do so.

Last summer we published a national resource for people with chronic pain to provide information which was developed in partnership with a range of stakeholders including clinical advisors and third sector partners and is regularly reviewed. This guidance referenced advice on the safety of steroid injections from the Faculty for Pain Medicine (FPM) which clearly highlighted the potential risk to providing these interventions during the pandemic and states: ‘As with all pain management procedures a risk benefit balance has to be reached in discussion with the patient. Each case is unique and no guidance will cover all eventualities.’

It is important to understand that it is not appropriate, nor is it the case, that Scottish Government officials or Ministers make or influence treatment or prescribing decisions, such as those related to the provision of pain procedures, as these are entirely for clinicians in charge of a patient’s care to make. When taking these decisions we expect clinicians to be aware of relevant guidance and to take into account the impact of pain on people’s quality of life and any safety considerations.

In order to ensure Health Boards prioritised remobilisation of their pain services, in September 2020 we published the COVID-19 Recovery Framework for NHS Pain Management Services to support them in this process. As set out in the Framework, we recognise that pain has a significant impact on people’s quality of life, and Health Boards are expected to triage cases locally based on clinical need and in line with advice from organisations, including the FPM and the British Pain Society. The Framework also stated the Government’s expectation that people awaiting treatment should be contacted to advise them about their support options should the services they attend be disrupted.

Evidence-based caution is at the forefront of our decision-making, and we will continue to work with Health Boards to remobilise the NHS in the safest possible way, while also supporting Boards to prioritise elective activity on the basis of clinical urgency. As set out in the Framework for Clinical Prioritisation, people awaiting treatment who are experiencing worsening or existing pain should be considered for prioritisation in line with the principles of active waiting list management. However, the number of patients who can be seen, diagnosed and treated may be reduced by the continuing and necessary infection prevention and control measures. Any decisions to scale back elective activity will be taken on an evidence basis and where the need to support COVID-19 patients exceeds capacity for elective care.

The Scottish Government takes seriously the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of all individuals, including those experiencing chronic pain. That is why we have published the Mental Health Transition and Recovery Plan which outlines our response to the mental health impacts of COVID-19.

The Scottish Government has made a commitment within the Transition and Recovery Plan to ensure that those who need mental health support as a result of delayed treatment of their physical health services are identified and directed to the appropriate support and care. This is part of our wider approach to ensure that people with a long term condition are also given support for their mental health and wellbeing and are involved in decisions affecting all aspects of their care.

The numbers of babies reported in the Scottish Birth Record (SBR) as having a diagnosis of ‘foetus and newborn affected by maternal use of drugs of addiction’ or ‘neonatal withdrawal symptoms from maternal use of drug addiction’ in Scotland during the period 2006-07 to 2016-17 are provided in the following table. The figures presented cover three year aggregates to avoid disclosing small numbers in each individual year. Further suppression of small numbers has been applied as per ISD’s Statistical Disclosure Control policy in order to protect patient confidentiality.

Number of babies affected by maternal use of drugs, financial three year aggregates, 2006-07-2008-09 to 2014-15-2016-17 1,2,3

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-00914 on 5 July 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.

The Scottish Government and Health Protection Scotland issued a range of clinical guidance relating to the discharge of older people from hospital into community settings.

This guidance has been continuously updated and a timeline of the clinical guidance issued is available in Annex A of the Public Health Scotland publication Discharges from NHSScotland hospitals to care homes which is available at https://beta.isdscotland.org/find-publications-and-data/population-health/covid-19/discharges-from-nhsscotland-hospitals-to-care-homes/28-october-2020/.

The historical deaths reported in the Scottish Sun were shocking in their alleged nature. However, enforcement of the Zoo Licencing Act 1981 is a matter for Local Authorities. In addition, I am aware that Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park is a member of the British and Irish Association of Zoo's and Aquaria, and that these incidents are currently the subject of an investigation by BIAZA. It would therefore be inappropriate for me to comment further, or indeed launch a further investigation, at this time.

Marine Scotland has spent £115,176 since 2016 on monitoring and supporting science of seabed marine plastics, floating surface microplastics and also beach litter citizen science data collected by the Marine Conservation Society volunteers. These costs do not include the vessel costs associated with monitoring marine plastics at sea as this monitoring is carried out using existing surveys.

Marine Scotland has also spent £213,437 since 2018 on monitoring and maintenance of the marine litter sink case study area of Arrochar to better understand the problem and inform future policies.

In addition, Marine Scotland also funded the Scrapbook project, a partnership between Moray Firth Partnership, Civil Air Support and the Marine Conservation Society, spending £123,000 in 2018/19. This aerial photography project identified marine litter sink hot spots around our coastline, providing a baseline for future monitoring and enabling effective, focused clean-up operations. Marine Scotland has taken the outputs of this project and added this data to the National Marine Plan Interactive (NMPi), which is free to access.

No discussions have taken place about having a dedicated vessel to monitor marine plastic pollution as this is already carried out by multi-purpose research vessels.