Audiology Services (Rural Areas)

Our recent programme for government included a commitment to work with the national health service, the third sector and other stakeholders to deliver an audiology improvement plan that is focused on the creation and implementation of more community-based models of care. The plan covers governance, quality assurance and workforce pipelines, ensuring that we have a strong foundation in place from which we can deliver sustainable improvements to audiology services over the long term. That will enable us to deliver more accessible, consistent and patient-centred care, including for our rural communities.

I thank the member for his questions, and my sympathies are with everybody who has had to wait too long. We want to make improvements to audiology services, because the position just now is clearly not good enough. The sustained pressures that we are facing are not unique to Scotland, and many similar challenges are being faced in audiology services across the United Kingdom.

The Scottish Government is committed to bringing down those long waits. The 2026-27 budget provides a record £22.5 billion for health and social care, and we have underlined our commitment to improve audiology services by increasing the funding for those services by £1 million. I am happy to meet the member to discuss the RNID near you service and to look at what might be done to improve services in his area.

I welcome the commitment that the Scottish National Party Government gave to meeting the audiology sector within the first 100 days to develop plans for future community audiology services. What was the outcome of those meetings and how will plans be enacted moving forward?

The developments will include an audiology improvement plan with Public Services Delivery Scotland, which will include supporting NHS services to work towards a target operating model for audiology; the creation of a regular audiology stakeholder forum; work to strengthen the collection and publication of data on audiology; the roll-out of the RNID near you initiative, as signalled in our manifesto; and work to learn from some of the excellent practice that happens in audiology in Scotland, in particular in NHS Tayside, which I understand has a particularly good audiology service.

The RNID near you service is excellent—I visited one such service fairly recently and was really impressed by what could be done with the support of volunteers in the community to help provide a very local response to audiology waits. Those volunteers can, for example, help to clean hearing aids and do small hearing tests; I was glad to have a test when I went to visit, so I can really see the benefit of that. I am happy to discuss further with the member where he thinks that that service would be useful in his region.