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The Refreshed Strategy for Volunteering in the NHS in Scotland is available at:

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I also refer the member to the answer to question S3W-10474 on 10 March 2008. All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament’s website, the search facility for which can be found at .

However, given the continuing increases in fuel costs, I would expect to see the rates for volunteer ambulance drivers to increase in light of these reviews.

The other information requested is given in the first table below. It should be noted that:

some of the figures may not provide a reliable indication of the normal level of mortality (they could be subject to large percentage year-to-year fluctuations because they are based on small numbers of deaths, as shown in the second table below);

n-a indicates not applicable - none of the parts of Scotland which fall within the specified quintile are included in that particular NHS board''s area.

Standardised Death Rates and Numbers of Deaths Registered in Scotland in 2006 - by NHS Board Area¹ and SIMD Quintile²

Notes:

1. Deaths of Scottish residents are counted on the basis of the addresses of their usual residences, as recorded when their deaths were registered; deaths of non-residents are counted on the basis of where they died.

2. The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is produced using a range of statistical information for each of the datazones in Scotland, which have 500-1,000 residents each. For Scotland as a whole, quintile 1 contains the most deprived 20% of datazones, and quintile 5 contains the least deprived 20% of datazones, when classified on the basis used for the SIMD; for the NHS boards, the figures for each quintile were produced from the data for those parts that are in each SIMD quintile. As a result, a NHS board may not include any of the datazones which fall into a particular quintile, or the figures shown may have been produced from the data for considerably more, or less, than 20% of the NHS board.

3. These figures were produced by using the distribution by age of the overall Scottish population for 2006. That is the same method as was used to produce the standardised death rates which appear in Table 2 of Scotland''s Population 2006.

4. The new Highland NHS board area, i.e. including parts of the former Argyll and Clyde NHS board area.

5. The total number of deaths from which the standardised death rate was calculated. This may be small because only a small proportion of a NHS board''s area was in a particular SIMD quintile: if so, the standardised death rate for a single year might not provide a reliable indication of the normal level of mortality because there could be large year-to-year percentage changes in the number of deaths. For example, if a particular quintile tended to have around 100 deaths per year, it would not be surprising if its figures fluctuated by 10-20% between one year and the next.

6. The sum of the figures for all the quintiles may differ slightly from the published total number of deaths for a NHS board''s area. There may be a number of reasons for this: for example, some of the datazones used in the SIMD might not fit properly within the boundary of the NHS board area, or corrections may have been made to some of the underlying data after the published figures were produced.