Chamber and committees

Thank you—I wanted to give you the opportunity that others have had to set out your challenges.

Stephanie Callaghan has a question.

We will take you up on that, for sure.

Thank you, minister. In your opening statement, you talked about what the patient safety commissioner will not do: they will not handle individual cases. You mentioned other avenues that patients might go down to have their concerns met. Why is there a need for a patient safety commissioner, given that there are all those other bodies that patients could go to if they have concerns? Can you articulate the overarching need for a commissioner?

Thank you, Paul. The next questions are from other Paul—Paul Sweeney.

We will move on to the views of the Finance and Public Administration Committee.

We have asked all the questions that we wanted to ask. We thank the minister and her officials for their time this morning.

I suggest that, next, we take item 4 on our agenda, which is consideration of subordinate legislation, before we have a break in advance of taking evidence from our panel on women and girls in sport, if members are happy to do that.

Members indicated agreement.

Welcome back to the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee. We now move to our first evidence session as part of our inquiry into female participation in sport and physical activity. I welcome to committee Katie Heath and Jenni Snell from the young women lead committee in the Young Women’s Movement, who did a similar inquiry around about 2019 and produced a very good report, “Young Women Lead”, as a result.

I was reading the report a couple of nights ago and a lot of it very much chimed with things that prompted our investigation. One of the main reasons why we are doing this inquiry is the evidence that we heard when we did our children and young people inquiry in the first year of this parliamentary session. The issue of female participation in physical activity and sport came up a lot in our informal sessions with younger women in particular.

I know what prompted us to do this, but why was it the topic that you homed in on, of all the many things that you could have chosen to focus on?

You are right that it is about not only sport; it touches on so many other areas as well. You mentioned body image in particular, and I know that your report mentioned the impact of social media on that.

In a way, you are your own focus group, because you are young women and bring those experiences with you. With the exception perhaps of Gillian Mackay—and I hope that I am not offending anyone—that is not the case for us. It is a long time since I was a young woman.

Although we are looking not only at young women’s participation but at the participation of women and girls, I would like to ask for your advice as to how we can hear the voices of young women in order to inform what we do here. We are doing a number of outreach events, but I would be interested to know how you went about engaging with people.

When we were doing our outreach sessions yesterday, someone said, “Don’t make any assumptions”. Obviously, the very reason that you decided to do your inquiry was the experiences of people in your group. However, as you did the outreach work and put together your report, was there anything that surprised you? Was there anything that you had not anticipated at the start? Am I putting you on the spot with that question?

I will let my colleagues in now. Sandesh Gulhane has a question on the report.