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The information requested on how many school nurses there have been in each local authority area since 2007 is not centrally held.

Information on school nurses by NHS Board has been published on the ISD website available here:

Note: Pre-2015 data is not comparable with recent ISD data therefore it has been omitted from the trend table.

The number of dedicated community nurses by NHS Board from 2007 to the most recent published data as at 31 March 2019 is on the ISD website, available here:

The link above shows the number of nurses who have a location of service delivery recorded as (i) hospital, (ii) community, (iii) combined hospital / community, (iv) other or (v) prison. This information can be found by selecting the Nursing & Midwifery tab where the drop down can be used to select community.

Further notes:

Further information on the statistics, including information on how the data are collected and notes to aid interpretation, is given in the 'FAQs' section of the Workforce Statistics website at .

The Scottish Government does not hold information on how many GPs offer private GP services.

The number of admissions from care homes to NHS hospitals for each NHS Board is shown in the following table, by calendar year. It should be noted that an individual patient may be counted more than once if they were admitted from a care home on multiple separate occasions.

This information is not held as private health sector treatment, which is not funded by the NHS, is not recorded on a national database.

Information on the number of prescription issued and uncollected within the time periods requested is not readily available.

Each community pharmacy contractor will have a standard operating procedure for dispensing medicine which will include how to deal with uncollected items. However, it is common practice for any medicines not collected and which have not left the premises to be returned to stock for re-use if appropriate, and no reimbursement payment is made for the medicine in this case. Prescription forms for uncollected medicines are then passed by community pharmacies to NHS National Services Scotland Practitioner and Counter Fraud Services for processing, endorsed by the pharmacy as “item not collected”.

The reasons why a prescription item may be uncollected are multifaceted. However, a new medicine intervention support tool has been introduced allowing community pharmacists to provide structured and tailored support to patients. This should increase adherence to new medicines, in turn reducing the number of uncollected items due to poor adherence.

The Scottish Government has not issued any specific guidance on the reuse of uncollected prescriptions. Practitioner and Counter Fraud Services and Community Pharmacy Scotland publish Endorsing Guidance which provides guidance on how to endorse prescriptions for any items not collected.

No information is collected specifically on how many people have been diagnosed with dementia in each year since 2007, either nationally or broken down by NHS Board.

The table below, published by NHS National Services Scotland, shows the number of formal dementia diagnosis registrations on the GP Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) Dementia Register, for years 2006-07 to 2015-16.

The year-on-year rise of registration numbers does not directly correlate with all of the new diagnosis registrations in each year, as the overall number is also affected by the removal of registrations as individuals die. This data underpinned NHS Board-level performance against the Scottish Government’s national dementia diagnosis HEAT target between 2007-2011.

The overall QOF was replaced by the GP Clusters approach as the mechanism to help drive improvement in primary care, effective from 1 April 2016.

The Scottish Government’s Estimated Annual Diagnosed Dementia Incidence report (published in 2016) estimates that almost 20,000 dementia cases will be diagnosed per year by 2020.

The Scottish Government does not hold the information in the manner requested. Prior to June 2015 arrangements for pharmacists in GP practices were local agreements put in place at Board level. However, from June 2015 the Primary Care Fund was allocated to Boards to recruit pharmacists with advanced clinical skills training, or those undertaking the training, to GP practices.

Therefore data for centrally funded posts exists from June 2015 onwards.

As at March 2019, Boards indicated they have recruited 320.2 wte pharmacists and 90.6 wte technicians to GP practices. The breakdown by Board is as follows :

Since 2016, through the Bank, Agency and Rostering Group (and its predecessor the MASNET group) the Scottish Government has engaged with NHS Boards on Staff Bank developments. Through this, Staff Banks have expanded to include nursing, medical, AHP and administration staff, and to work on a regional basis, allowing staff the opportunity to work across NHS Board boundaries. Representation on this groups includes Scottish Government, NHS Employers and Staff Side representation.

The case for a national Staff Bank has been fully considered. Evidence shows that in most cases such a service would provide limited benefit due to the fact the majority of staff prefer to work within their local radius. There are however areas where technological advances mean a national bank would be of benefit. Such a case is the Radiology Reporting Service, which will launch in late summer 2019, allowing Radiology staff the opportunity to provide additional reporting capacity across NHSScotland through the use of a national IT connectivity platform that enables images taken anywhere in Scotland to be reported on from anywhere in Scotland.

This information is not held centrally. The member may wish to contact individual Health Boards to obtain this information.