Chamber and committees

Thank you. It is important that all parents understand the impacts of poverty and take them into account when making decisions.

You have touched on a lot of important points, some of which will be picked up later by my colleagues. It is good to hear about the Scottish Government’s focus on wellbeing, childcare and so on, and that we are on the right track with that.

I have a direct question for John Dickie. Covid has been a bit of a leveller in some ways. Tragedy has struck some families who would never have expected to be in poverty—the rug has been ripped from under their feet. There is a general feeling that that could happen to any of us at any time.

To go back a bit, I am a councillor in South Lanarkshire Council, and some of our parent councils took part in the Child Poverty Action Group poverty proofing schools project, which seemed to make quite an impact locally. Can you tell us about the outcomes of that project and how effective it was?

Does anyone want to add to that?

It is for Chaloner Chute, convener.

I was just saying that this is a bit like building the aeroplane while we are flying it, and Chris Mackie talked about keeping people at the centre of things, choice, inclusion and people having not only access, control and ownership but security. The pace has gone through the roof, but although we can reflect on what has happened, we actually need to keep up the pace with the huge demographic changes that we are facing. How can we do that?

That is great—thank you very much.

I mentioned that GPs are incentivised, but it is a matter of recording the core data in a standardised way: that is probably the important part of it. What helpful things can we learn from other countries about the minimum data sets for social care?

I thank the panel for being here today and for the interesting stuff that is coming out. I am reminded of an NHS worker out in Lanarkshire who said that all this is like building an aeroplane while you are flying it, which was something that I could really relate to.

I am very interested in Chris Mackie’s comments about keeping people at the centre of things, choice, inclusion and citizens having not only access, control and ownership but security. The pace of things has been pretty mind blowing, but we are also facing huge demographic changes. We do need to reflect on what is happening, but how can we ensure that we keep the pace up and, indeed, accelerate things?

It is very short. There has been quite a bit of talk this morning about diversity and variation across the country, but I note that there is not a great deal of diversity on the panel today. Is that an issue that needs to be addressed, or do we have diversity across the teams as part of the collaboration and co-production? I just want to check whether that is the case.

We have been talking about the challenge of pulling together the data and information for effective use in primary care. The situation in social care is wholly different; it has really big gaps. Scott Heald mentioned public trust and confidence; because of going through Covid, people appreciate the importance of access to data, which is helpful. For quite a long time, our GPs have been incentivised to record core data in a standardised way. How could the NCS assist in bringing through something similar for social care?

I am sorry, convener—could I ask one more question?