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Due to an absence of Scottish Government landholdings (i.e. presence of Scotland’s national forests and land) in East Lothian and/or Midlothian, Forestry and Land Scotland have not conducted any tree planting (either restocking or new planting) in the two local authority areas in the period of 2007 to 2022.

During 2020, national treatment targets were suspended in recognition of the necessary response to the covid-19 pandemic, before being reinstated in 2021.

We know that the covid-19 pandemic had a major impact across our health services, including the detection and treatment of Hepatitis C. In considering the re-instatement of Hepatitis C treatment targets, both the impact of COVID and associated steps to manage it were considered by the SHPN Hepatitis C Elimination Group, which comprises clinical expertise from Scottish Health Boards.

A recent PHS report shows that the number of new diagnoses made in 2020 and 2021 were the lowest recorded in the last decade. Encouragingly, however, it also shows that major progress has been made despite the pandemic. For example, there is evidence to indicate that Scotland has already achieved one of the WHO targets set for 2030; 80% of those ever diagnosed having received treatment.

The full PHS report can be found here:

The Scottish Government remains committed to eliminating Hepatitis C as a major public health concern by 2024.

We must recognise the impact the covid-19 pandemic has had on services, as well as the monitoring and evaluation of HCV data.

However, despite that impact, PHS recently published a report (“Surveillance of hepatitis C in Scotland”) which shows that major progress has been made on a number of key targets including a large drop in cases in people who inject drugs, with some parts of Scotland seeing as much as a 70% reduction. This is hugely encouraging. As we continue to recover from the pandemic, we must build on that progress and continue to work with key stakeholders to remove this public health threat.

There are a number of ways that good practice, clinical updates and learning on women’s health are shared across primary care. Examples of this include:

• Regular women’s health update days for primary care held at both board and national level.
• Regular training and updates for a range of women’s services, including perinatal care, smear taking, long acting contraception insertion and removal, and the menopause.
• Working with pharmacy colleagues on ensuring up-to-date and relevant prescribing information is available.
• Primary care engagement through local interface groups in developing local pathways and protocols for women’s health.
• Dissemination of updated guidelines on women’s health from areas such as SIGN, NICE and Royal Colleges through local distribution networks, signposting to new, relevant publications such as the Women’s Health Plan.
• Supporting shared learning around good practice through initiatives such as funding for first 5 GPs to attend local, problem-based small learning groups.

Additionally, locally and nationally driven learning through innovative practice is shared via primary and secondary care networks. Examples of this include:

• Increasing cervical screening uptake through using enhanced engagement techniques targeting opportunistic and vulnerable groups.
• Learning from recent trials of group education and group consultations on menopause at general practice level.
• The National Menopause Specialist Network, where examples of innovative practice across primary and secondary care are regularly shared.

Sharing good practice will be an ongoing piece of work throughout the lifetime of the Women’s Health Plan.

The NHS in Scotland has a strong track record of delivering innovative sexual health and blood borne virus services.

For example, in 2017, Scotland was one of the first countries in the world to introduce an HIV Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis service - offering free preventative medication to those deemed at highest risk of acquiring HIV.

To ensure we build on this progress, in December 2022, the Scottish Government committed to support a pilot for an online service providing access to PrEP. Work on this is now being taken forward.

The Scottish Government has also committed to improving testing for sexual health and blood borne viruses, to ensure more people can receive the treatment they need. We have funded a home-testing HIV pilot project run by HIV Scotland to help evaluate the viability of this approach and its scope to increase parity of access in remote and rural areas. We have also provided over £0.5m for the development of a “once for Scotland” approach to STI home testing. This was rolled out in NHS Lothian in December, and work is underway to explore further roll-out. This service allows people to request a test online and perform home self-sampling, while providing clinicians with comprehensive, real-time data.

We recognise that the development of new models of service and treatment is an ongoing, iterative process. The Scottish Government will continue to support this, including through development of the next Sexual Health and Blood Borne Viruses Framework.

Through Reset and Rebuild - sexual health and blood borne virus services: recovery plan, published in August 2021, the Scottish Government provided an additional £0.5m of funding to assist sexual health and blood borne virus services to begin recovery from the covid-19 pandemic.

Amongst the numerous projects funded through the Recovery Plan was the SHARE project launched by HIV Scotland, further details of which can be found here:

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In addition, the Scottish Government has supported the Conundrum project, which was designed to understand factors shaping young people’s experiences of contraception, and provided insight into how young people’s access to condoms and contraception was disrupted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Details of the project can be found here: .

Understanding the impact of the pandemic will require on-going support, and it is expected that the next iteration of the Sexual Health and Blood Borne Viruses Framework, which will be published this year, will continue this work.

It is for each Board to decide how to deliver healthcare services in line with the needs of their local populations. However, following the suspension of treatment targets in 2020, and after advice from the Scottish Health Protection Network Hepatitis C Elimination Group, national treatment targets were reinstated in 2021 at a level of at least 2000 new treatment initiations for 2021-22 rising to 3000 in 22-23.

This information is not held centrally by the Scottish Government. However, information regarding PrEP uptake is published by Public Health Scotland and can be found here: .

The National Transition Training Fund was operational from October 2020 until August 2022. Within this period 885 training places were made available across a number of projects focused on social care. This number excludes college data from the 2021-22 academic year as this data is included within official Further Education Statistics (FES) due to be published in February. A report on the second and final year of NTTF will be published following the publication of FES data, and the college data will be included in the final published report.

As set out in the August 2021 Plan the establishment of a Women’s Health Research Fund is a long term action with a delivery timescale of three years or more from publication.