Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government will set out in due course how we will deliver the commitments set out in the manifesto.

The Scottish Government will in due course publish a breakdown of the appointments & procedures which will be delivered as a result of the additional £90m announced to tackle long waits.

In Partnership with NHS Scotland, the Scottish Government produce regularly reviewed condition focused Quality Prescribing Guides to support prescribers in their decision making.

We have recently published our updated Polypharmacy Guidance: appropriate prescribing, making medicines safe, effective and sustainable 2026 - 2029, which contains a series of recommendations for medication review for people receiving care at home and in care homes.

In addition to the recommendations, the guidance includes practical advice and options for tailoring care for specific conditions which may affect people in care homes. This includes hot topics on Parkinson’s disease and on managing dementia and cognitive enhancers, as well as case studies produced in collaboration with care home providers on addressing the use of psychoactive medication for people living with dementia through non-pharmacological techniques.

New tailored indicators for care homes have been developed within the updated suite of National Therapeutic Indicators (NTIs) accompanying this guidance. These open access NTIs support boards and practices with identifying appropriate areas to target for patient review and benchmarking at local and national level.

We do not centrally collect data on the number of appointments undertaken to assess sleep apnoea across NHS Boards. This level of information would be held by individual NHS Boards.

The commitments set out in this year’s budget, published on 4 March 2026, will deliver a record £22.5 billion funding for health and social care in 2026-27, supporting delivery of planned care for patients across Scotland to increase capacity and address backlogs of treatment as we work towards achieving the 12-week treatment time guarantee.

Backlog maintenance within the NHS estate is assessed and reported at the level of individual maintenance items rather than buildings. Consequently, individual buildings are not assigned an overall risk rating, as they may contain multiple backlog maintenance items with different risk ratings.

Condition and Functional Suitability assessments are undertaken and recorded for individual buildings within the NHS estate. However, the Scottish Government does not routinely hold information on the number of buildings assessed as category C or D for either Condition or Functional Suitability.

Based on the latest available NHS estate data, 34% of the estate by floor area was assessed as being in Condition C or D, while 26% of the estate by floor area was assessed as having Functional Suitability rated C or D.

The following tables present the latest available statistics on the total number of patient non-attendances at a new outpatient appointment for reasons ‘did not attend (DNA)’ (Table 1), ‘could not attend (CNA)’ (Table 2) and ‘cancellation by service’ (Table 3). The data are presented by health board of treatment for all specialties and broken down by calendar year. Please note that calendar year 2026 only includes data up to 30 June 2026 and figures are therefore not reflective of a complete calendar year.

Table 1 – Total number of non-attendances at a new outpatient appointment for reason ‘did not attend (DNA)’ for all specialties, split by health board of treatment, by calendar year from 2021 to present.

Work to recruit and appoint a new National Clinical Lead for Palliative Care is ongoing. Further information will be made available in due course.

The Scottish Government does not hold data on the number of people diagnosed annually with dementia, but Public Health Scotland (PHS) does publish information on the number of people in different health settings with a diagnosis of dementia. This doesn’t necessarily reflect when a person would have been first diagnosed with dementia.

The Scottish Government does not hold data on how many missed GP appointments there have been in each year since 2021, broken down by NHS board.

PHS publishes information relevant to this question using GP encounters data as part of the General Practice in-hours activity visualisation publication. Encounters are not the same as appointments as not all encounters will be recorded on an appointment booking system. Further information on the limitations of this data can be found on the publication website.