Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 20 January 2021
The First Minister talked a lot about that in response to the questions that she received at First Minister’s question time earlier today. There have been issues to do with the quantity of vaccine, the number of doses that come in the packs and how the packs are distributed. However, we are in regular contact with boards to find out whether there are any problems with supply. As I said, we are working extremely hard to ensure that we iron out those problems as far as we possibly can. Just because we are allocated a certain amount of vaccine, that does not necessarily mean that that amount of vaccine will automatically be delivered to us.
We want to make the process as easy and as streamlined as possible and get the supplies out as fast as we can, and we are continually working to do that. This week, we will write to all GPs to explain in more detail the mechanism of supply, ordering and delivery, and we will include suggested solutions at local board level that can assist them. I hope that that is helpful in answering Mr Greene’s question.
Home care staff are being vaccinated as part of the front-line health and social care worker group, as per the recommendations of the JCVI. Testing for home care staff started on Monday and it includes care-at-home staff in sheltered housing and day care and personal assistants. That marks a significant expansion of testing in social care, adding again to the layers of protection that are in place for our key workers, the people they serve and our communities.
Like vaccination, testing is a layer of protection, but it has to be supported by appropriate PPE and strict hand hygiene. The reason why we are following that advice is to prevent more people from dying. By following the advice, we prevent more people who are vulnerable to serious illness and death from requiring NHS care, and thereby protect the NHS.
I do not need to tell anyone in the chamber that the situation remains precarious and extremely serious. The pressure on the NHS is severe and it is increasing.? There has been a rapid rise in the number of Covid-19 hospitalisations in the past two weeks, fuelled by the new variant strain, and we are at the highest rate in the pandemic to date.
The Scottish Government is in daily communication with health boards and their planning partners to ensure that we use the whole country’s capacity appropriately. We have already doubled ICU capacity since the start of the pandemic, and we have the ability to treble it, subject to staffing. NHS Scotland is using the independent sector to ensure that clinically urgent patients can continue to be seen and treated, and that additional support comes on top of the extra capacity that is already being provided by the NHS Golden Jubilee and NHS Louisa Jordan hospitals for a number of elective treatments and out-patient appointments.
Since the start of the pandemic, we have worked hard to ensure that infection prevention and control measures in hospitals and other care settings are robust, and we expect our health boards to have the highest standards. However, we know that, as community prevalence rises, so too does the number of hospital-onset cases. In line with increases in community prevalence, we have seen the number of hospital-onset cases increase since October last year.
Although transmission of Covid-19 is more likely where people are in enclosed settings, including in hospitals, we have robust IPC measures in place. They include risk-assessed patient care pathways, the appropriate use of PPE, extended use of face masks and coverings in all areas of the hospital, physical distancing, robust outbreak management, and testing to minimise nosocomial transmission as far as possible.
The guidance is developed by IPC experts on a four-nations basis and it is continually reviewed in the light of new and emerging evidence. Although there is currently no evidence of a clinical need to change the guidance, I understand that the chief nursing officer keeps it under active review and engages with staff representatives on the PPE guidance and the use of FFP3 masks. I believe that staff should be able to exercise the risk assessment process to have access to the PPE that is considered professionally necessary.