Chamber and committees

Are you taking direct actions to address that issue?

That was a fantastic story, Hugh. It was also great to hear from Joanna Campbell about the planning for progression from college to university. How are colleges engaging with local businesses and sectors to grow the curriculum in key areas of research and commercial opportunities such as renewables and engineering?

I have a short follow-up question. You talk about it often being the professionals who are leading things in a certain direction. Is there a place for something like an individual action plan that people would share with different health and social care providers in order to centre things back on their own priorities? When people are having those conversations it is easy for the options to be quite limited. That action plan approach could help, or would that fly in the face of things being based on data and evidence?

It would be good if Professor Wittenberg could comment.

Yes, it was about the protective impact of preventative measures, but I also asked about service delivery—for example, about concerns over whether there are increasing demands on staff pay and therefore less money to be spent on service delivery, and how that might be tackled.

I have a question for Professor Bell. When we talk about the national care service, we are focusing on what matters to individuals and on supporting people to achieve the outcomes that they want. My thinking is that that is about their health and wellbeing. If they feel better, that is likely to improve their wellbeing, which can have a huge impact on health as well. That seems to be at the heart of the national care service, so how much does that preventative impact fall into the bigger picture? I do not know whether I have explained that particularly well.

I thank everyone for coming to the meeting.

We have already touched on pay quite a lot. Since the end of 2019, there has been a significant increase in employment in NHS Scotland. We are looking at a figure of 14,000 and, quite rightly, we are not expecting that to drop off to pre-pandemic levels. There are two really big demands across health and social care: the demand to increase pay, especially with high inflation and the expectation that it will rise further, and the demand for additional staff. How can those two things be balanced? I ask Professor Bell that question first.

It would be incredibly helpful to have that.

Professor Bell, you have picked up on a point about the difference that prevention strategies could make. Would you expect preventative care and preventative strategies to make quite an impact going forward? Are there concerns around service delivery, if pay is taking up quite a chunk? Might service delivery be affected if there is less funding?

That is all right.

We know that wellbeing is absolutely central to young people’s learning and performance. I was interested to hear Robert Quinn talk about the evaluation work. What are young people telling you about their learning experiences? What is happening with the idea of keeping wellbeing at the centre of reform, and what difference has that made?

Mike Baxter spoke about the delivery board fulfilling its commission, and I appreciate the fact that experience, knowledge and skills are required on the board. The leadership teams from the Scottish Government, the SQA and Education Scotland are working together within the existing governance and accountability frameworks to establish a new organisation. Is that working well? What progress has been made on that?