Questions on Exercise Cygnus and page extracts: FOI release

Information requested

Please provide the title of Scottish Government Ministers (including the First Minister), Cabinet Secretaries and health officials that attended each of the four COBRA meetings.

Page 42 states that participants in EC were asked to produce:

1) evaluation of their performance against the criteria based on the exercise objectives
2) complete an evaluation sheet
3) produce hot and cold debrief notes
4) fill in a questionnaire following Exercise Cygnus.

Page 48 of the report indicates that the Scottish Government provided the evaluation sheet, hot debrief notes and the questionnaire. Please provide each of these. Please also provide the evaluator report produced by the Scottish Government’s exercise evaluator and the cold debrief notes.

Page 24 states “in order to attempt to assess adult social care capacity the Department for Health Devised a SitRep template that could be used by the SCGs to report on capacity within the Social Care System.”

Please confirm if the SG received the SitRep, and if so, please provide a copy of the Scottish Government’s completed SitRep.

Page 24 contains lesson 18 identified. It states: “a methodology for assessing social care capacity and surge capacity during a pandemic should be developed. This work should be conducted by DCLG, DH, Directors of Adult Social Services (DASS) and with colleagues in the devolved administrations”

Please confirm if following Exercise Cygnus the Scottish Government assessed (or commissioned/and/or/asked another body or individual to assess) the capacity of Scotland's social care system to deal with an influenza pandemic. If yes, please provide a copy of the assessment report(s).

Response

Please see attached a document which contains most of the information you have requested. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide a small amount of the information.

This is because an exemption under section 38(1)(b) of FOISA (personal information) applies to some of the information as it is personal data of a third party, i.e. the names of individuals, and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 1998. This exemption is not subject to the 'public interest test', so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. All personal information has been marked as "REDACTED" in the enclosed correspondence.

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FOI/202000068643 - Information Released

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42 page PDF

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1.4 MB