Chamber and committees

Well, I heard that.

I want to take you on to the primary care improvement fund. In your paper entitled “Scotland’s Long COVID Service”, which was published in September 2021, you said:

“Through our Primary Care Improvement Fund, we will continue to support and expand the range of professional roles in primary care that play a key role in the provision of services that can support people with long COVID.”

Therefore, we all agree, but the fund was cut by £65 million in the emergency budget review. Did that not have an impact on primary care and community-based support for long Covid services?

Thank you.

Okay. So you are carrying that bit forward. That is fine.

Less than £3 million was allocated to health boards as part of the £10 million over three years and you will recall that, at the point that you made the allocation, 74,000 people were affected by long Covid. Of course, now, unfortunately, 175,000 people are affected. Do you intend to increase the overall resource available?

I welcome your comments about improving services, cabinet secretary. I will pick up where you left off. You said that there was a £1.1 million underspend, but the allocation that I have in the table in front of me is for £334,000. Where is the rest of the money being spent?

It does indeed, but that has not been the case in every health board across Scotland—

I will take that as a commitment from the incoming First Minister to increase long Covid funding. Thank you so much—you have made my day.

Ralph, did you want to come in briefly?

That is great, because we do not have an awful lot of time and we need to talk about staffing more generally.

Good morning, Deputy First Minister. I am conscious of and understand the difficulty and uncertainty in predicting what will happen with the pandemic, particularly as new variants are being experienced. However, what I see is that population testing has largely ended and the Lighthouse labs are closing. It has been suggested to me that antiviral medication is not getting to people in time, and we are not yet using prophylactics in Scotland.

All those things will vary depending on the prevalence of Covid at any time, but I want to explore what the flexibility and surge capacity are, beyond what you have said, that would allow things to be flexed up really quickly. In response to Murdo Fraser’s questions, you talked about additional funding for the health budget, but are those measures covered by existing Covid consequentials or have you had to add to them?

It was much higher—