To ask the Scottish Executive how many cardiac specialist nurses there are in the NHS Grampian area. (S2O-12513)

As of September 2006, NHS Grampian had 2.8 whole-time equivalent cardiac specialist nurses.

I do not know whether the minister is aware that the Grampian heart failure service has been disbanded as a result of a lack of funding, which means that the NHS Grampian area is the only one in Scotland that does not have a dedicated heart failure service or heart failure specialist nurses. What is the Executive doing to help to re-establish that service for Grampian, in the light of the British Heart Foundation's suggestion that NHS Grampian requires a minimum of 5.5 full-time equivalent specialist nurses to ensure adequate provision of specialist heart failure care in that region?

The question is premised on an assumption that is incorrect. The issue is not to do with a lack of funding—it is about decisions that boards make locally about how they think services can best be delivered. Of course our boards make those decisions—I do not determine the workforce of every NHS board in Scotland.

NHS Grampian has indicated to us that its plans include consideration of how it will take the service in question from the acute setting to the primary care setting in local communities, and of how it will provide the service in a different way, which will involve training more nurses so that they have the skills to intervene appropriately.

Far from making suggestions about resources, I suggest with due respect to Mrs Milne that NHS Grampian is doing things in a different way, but it is nonetheless responsible for providing the service to people in the community. I also remind her that we have attracted not 12,000, but 15,000 new nurses to our health service, that the number of nurses increased by 2.3 per cent last year, and that a record number of people are training to be nurses in our system. We are continuing to invest in our health service and allowing services to be rolled out in different ways while ensuring that they are provided as locally as possible and that the necessary specialisation exists.