The Chief Medical Officer (CMO) is the Scottish Government's principal medical adviser and is also Head of the Scottish Medical Civil Service. The post covers every aspect of health in Scotland.

Sir Harry is keen to encourage the assets based approach to people's health which focuses on behaviours and influences and also the social factors which impact people's health and wellbeing, especially in their early lives.

He took up post as Chief Medical Officer for Scotland in September 2005.

The BOA President meets with the CMO for Scotland periodically to discuss trauma and orthopaedic issues

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Health/NHS-Scotland/17914

Appointed Senior Medical Officer to the then Scottish Office Department of Health in 1992. Deputy Chief Medical Officer since 1999. Honorary consultant in haematology at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.

Longstanding interest in the influence of lifestyle risk factors on health and champion of the Health Promoting Health Service in Scotland. Currently chair of the Scottish Cancer Taskforce.

The Scottish Committee for Orthopaedics and Trauma (SCOT). SCOT is a committee of elected orthopaedic surgeons from each of the regions in Scotland, plus the clinical directors of each of the orthopaedic departments in Scotland (the chairman of which sits on the British Orthopaedic Association council).  For full details go to:

http://www.orthopaedicseminar.com/scottish-committee-for-orthopaedics-and-trauma-scot.aspx

The Scottish Arthroplasty Project steering committee is made up of three orthopaedic nominees, one of whom must chair, a medical director, ISD members including a public health consultant (who is the "Caldicott Guardian" for data security) and two patient representatives.

Representatives are elected for three years with an option to renew this term only once. The chair must be a practicing orthopaedic surgeon whose data appears in the report.

The Scottish Arthroplasty Project (SAP) was established in 1999 with the following aims.

• To instigate change through continual feedback.
  
• To set individual results in a local and national context.
  
• To use outcomes which the public could identify with (death, dislocation, infection, DVT/PE and re-operation).
  

The SAP is an administrative dataset derived from the Scottish Morbidity Record (SMR01). Each individual in Scotland has a unique Community Health Index number (CHI) used in all patient episodes. All NHS hospitals in Scotland submit an SMR01 return for every patient episode. As well as the patient demographics, this record contains information about the dates of admission and discharge, surgeon, diagnosis, operation and up to five other co-morbid events relating to that admission. Any subsequent admission (or transfer) is similarly coded. These records are submitted to and linked by the Information and Statistics Division centrally (ISD) using the patient's unique identifier. The patient's journey and history can be tracked before and after the index procedure. Thus reporting co-morbidities, complication rates and ensuring patient confidentiality (all data is professionally encrypted).

The data is submitted by the local hospital and "owned" by the local hospital that has to undertake any corrections to the dataset and resubmit it to ISD. Quarterly listings are sent to consultants to verify and amend the data.

The data and the clinical content of the annual report are managed by the Scottish Arthroplasty Project Steering Committee, which is overseen by the Scottish Committee for Orthopaedics and Trauma (SCOT).