Health Board funding for tackling heart disease: FOI release

Information requested

“The total amount of funding provided by the Scottish Government to NHS Health Boards specifically for the purpose of tackling heart disease, from 2020 to the present (including the most recent year available). Broken down by year and health board."

Response

This is a formal notice under section 17(1) of FOISA that the Scottish Government does not have the information you have requested. We do not currently present or calculate our NHS Scotland spend by health condition. Therefore, the Scottish Government funding to NHS Scotland to tackle heart disease is stored in numerous financial reports. Calculating and presenting this spend would require specialist analysis and aggregation of the raw data. This would result in the creation of a new source of information not currently held by the Scottish Government. This information is therefore not suitable to be released under FOISA, as only information present at the time of the request (in this case, 6 August 2025) can be issued.

Since 2021, the Scottish Government has provided funding to health boards to drive implementation of our Heart Disease Action Plan 2021, which includes;

• Commissioning Public Health Scotland to develop the Scottish Cardiac Audit Programme, committing
• more than £1.5m over five years to support this transformative change in access to, and use of, data to drive improvement in cardiac services.
• Funding eight projects to drive improvement in cardiac care in Scotland, including the West of Scotland Inherited Cardiac Condition service’s project on sudden cardiac death, which has now received national scale-up funding from the BHF Innovation Fund.
• 10% of the £100m 2025-26 reform fund will be apportioned to enhanced services in General Practice, with most of this going to support 100,000 patients with enhanced service GP appointments by March 2026 for key cardiovascular risk factors, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, obesity, and smoking.

Additionally, both the Health and Social Care Service Renewal Framework (SRF) and the Population Health Framework (PHF) place prevention and early intervention at their core. The actions in the PHF – promoting healthy eating, investing in sport and active living, and work to reduce the harms of smoking – will support the prevention of heart disease in Scotland.​​​​​​​

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.