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Attracting and retaining the right people, and raising the status of social care as a profession, is key to delivering quality care. That is why we have taken action to protect our social care services, including paying the real Living Wage to adult care workers, a move that has benefited up to 40,000 care workers.

And our living wage commitment will be extended to cover sleepover hours during 2018-19.

The work we have begun with our major stakeholders on all three Parts of the National Health and Social Care Workforce Plan is designed to ensure safe, sustainable and high quality services right across our NHS, social care and primary care services. The Part 2 recommendations, which were published in December 2017, cover the social care workforce and will directly address recruitment challenges, promote career pathways and improve workforce development in social care.

This specific information is not held centrally. In terms of health and social care more generally, the Scottish Government is working to develop a medium term financial framework, within the context of the budget settlement that the Scottish Government receives. This will be to outline the broad direction for the NHS and care services to meet the changing needs of the people of Scotland, including taking account of such demographic factors and shifting the balance of care towards community health services.

At a local level, Integration Authorities are responsible for strategic planning of adult social care services. The Scottish Government is providing analytical support in local partnerships to support analysis of demand for social care support.

Since April, Integration Authorities have new responsibilities under the Carers (Scotland) Act 2016 for local carer strategies setting out carer support available locally, including short breaks, and an assessment of demand. They are also responsible for publishing short breaks services statements providing information about short breaks available for both carers and those they care for.

The purpose of the Short Breaks Fund is to increase the range, availability and choice of short breaks for carers and the people they care for, through the development and delivery of short breaks projects and services by third sector organisations.

The Scottish Government has funded Shared Care Scotland and Family Fund to manage the Short Breaks Fund. Shared Care Scotland manage three distinct schemes: Creative Breaks; Better Breaks and Time To Live. Family Fund manage a scheme called Take a Break.

Shared Care Scotland is allocated £2.3m annually by the Scottish Government to operates three distinct programmes: Better Breaks; Creative Breaks and Time to Live. More information can be found here: and also at .

The Better Breaks programme provides 12 month grants to third sector organisations to develop and deliver short breaks projects and services for children and young people with disabilities (aged 20 and under), and their carers (adult carers and/or young carers).

More information can be found here: .

Creative Breaks provides 12 month grants to third sector organisations to develop and deliver short breaks projects and services for carers of adults(aged 21 years and over), carers of older people (aged 65 years and over), young carers (caring for children or adults), and those that they care for. This programme opens for applications in April each year.

More information can be found here: .

A snapshot of the impact ‘Creative Breaks’ had during 2016–2017 can be found here .

The Time to Live programme provides grant funding to carers organisations (usually carers centres) to develop and deliver micro grants schemes for carers of adults (aged 21 years and over), carers of older people (aged 65 years and older) and young carers. TTL enables carers to access funds and support to help them take short breaks that meet their needs. This programme is not open to unsolicited applications. More information can be found here: .

Family Fund’s ‘Take a Break’ programme is allocated £700K annually by the Scottish Government. It is Scotland’s short break fund for disabled children and their families. It aims to provide families with the choice and opportunity to access a single or ongoing break from caring. Take a Break grants enable families caring for a disabled or seriously ill child or young person to have the opportunity to choose how they would like to take a break, with a view to improving the quality of life, health and wellbeing of the whole family. More information can be found here: .

The "Valuing Carers 2015" report authored by Professor Sue Yeandle (University of Sheffield) and Dr Lisa Buckner (University of Leeds) estimates that carers in Scotland provided care services to the value of £10.8 billion in 2015.

This question seeks police data, which is not held by the Scottish Government. The Government understands that complete figures may not be available for the time period requested, due to differing approaches among legacy forces.

Due to developments in the NHS Research Scotland infrastructure, directly comparable data across the clinical specialties is only available from 2015-16. The following table shows patient recruitment to clinical trials by year, broken down by the 27 NHS Research Scotland clinical specialties. The 2017-18 figures are subject to final verification.

The number of health visitors employed by NHSScotland is published quarterly by Board.

• Data from 2015 to the most recent data, published on 5 December 2017, can be found at .

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 Trauma Network (STN) aims to better meet the needs of the population of Scotland. The STN has been established to support four regional networks (North, East, South East and West), the Scottish Ambulance Service and the Scottish Trauma Audit to working collaboratively across traditional specialty and geographical boundaries to effectively deliver high quality, integrated care to severely injured patients. The STN has made assessment of trauma-informed emergency services, from pre-hospital through acute and into rehabilitation provision. This new approach will save more lives and improve patient outcomes.

Information on consultant numbers, of which consultants working in surgical specialities is a sub category, is published by ISD Scotland and is available at the following web links:

Data from 1997-2007 can be found here:

Data from 2007-Dec 17 can be found here:

The Cost Recovery Scheme is administered by the DWP on behalf of the Scottish Government and all recoveries are paid directly to the Health Boards. Although the Scottish Government does not therefore hold information on the amounts recovered by Health Boards individually, total amounts recovered, by year, are detailed in the following table.