Chamber and committees

We have a few minutes left and I promised Audrey Nicoll that, in that case, she could come in to talk about drug law.

I want to press you on your comment about the interventions that we are not currently using. Will you expand on that?

Welcome to the first joint meeting in 2023 of the members of the Criminal Justice Committee, the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee and the Social Justice and Social Security Committee. We will be considering the progress that has been made in implementing the recommendations of the Scottish Drug Deaths Taskforce report.

We are joined by a selection of members from each of the committees, but we have also received apologies from the following members who usually like to join us: Miles Briggs, Foysol Choudhury and Sue Webber. Pauline McNeill is attending the meeting, too; she is joining us online.

Agenda item 1 is a decision on taking business in private. Do members agree to take item 3 in private?

Members indicated agreement.

That is really interesting. Ralph Roberts, are you doing something similar to ascertain how the situation is impacting on your patients?

I would have asked Claire Burden about the situation, too, but she does not seem to be online yet. I throw the questioning open to my colleagues. Paul Sweeney has some questions for our panel.

Paul Sweeney will now ask questions about performance, although we have touched on that already.

Emma Harper has some questions.

I want to bring you both back in before I move on to other colleagues—I will bring Paul Sweeny back in in a second.

The purpose of the uplift that you got from the Scottish Government was to reduce waiting times, and, I imagine, to support a certain amount of recovery from Covid. You mentioned that it was not to deal with things such as fuel costs and inflation, because at the point at which the uplift was decided, those issues were not as acute as they are right now.

This is an obvious question—it is almost a rhetorical question—but what is your assessment of how the two factors that we have talked about affect your ability to deal with waiting times?

A number of colleagues are going to look at staffing, but that is a good and helpful basis for that discussion.

So there is precedent elsewhere that we can potentially learn from. We may need to factor that into our recommendations on that subject.