More than £10 million of funding is being given to the NHS to help hospitals prepare for winter.
Health Secretary Shona Robison insisted the Scottish Government is "committed to providing additional support to health boards" over the busy winter period.
Health boards will receive £10.7 million, with the cash going towards extra staff over the festive period and increasing the number of patients discharged from hospital at weekends.
Ms Robison said NHS bosses could also use the funding to inform people when they should go to accident and emergency - and when they would be better contacting NHS 24 or their GP out-of-hours service.
It comes after the NHS in Scotland had a ''particularly challenging'' winter, with health boards being forced to cancel planned operations and some patients experiencing lengthy delays in A&E.
The Scottish Government has already spent more than £30 million on reducing bed blocking in the NHS this year, with another £9 million being used to ensure health boards implement six essential actions in A&E departments this winter.
In addition, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde is being given £5 million to help cope this winter, the first since the flagship Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow opened.
Ms Robison said: "This year's funding, which comes to around £55 million in total, will help target improving A&E waiting times and patient flow through hospital as well as tackling delayed discharge - which we know create additional challenges over the winter months.
"Boards have already been allocated much of this funding, putting them on the front foot as we head towards winter.
"This also follows on from our winter guidance, issued in August - the earliest we have issued winter guidance - which asks boards to have in place strategies for staffing additional capacity to maintain progress towards minimising delays in discharging patients.
"With more people now living with long-term conditions and a growing number of older people with multiple conditions and complex needs, it is vital that we have robust preventative care plans in place for winter."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here