Chamber and committees

The second half of our agenda today is an examination of a briefing paper that was prepared by the Auditor General for Scotland, “Decarbonising heat in homes”. I welcome our witnesses, all of whom are from Audit Scotland. We have the Auditor General, Stephen Boyle; Cornilius Chikwama, an audit director; and Derek Hoy, an audit manager.

We have a number of questions. Before we get to those, I invite the auditor general to make an opening statement.

Right—that is very useful. Thank you.

Colin Beattie will now put some questions to you about funding and investment.

Okay—thank you. Graham Simpson wants to come in on some of those points, and then I will bring in Willie Coffey.

I call Willie Coffey.

Thank you, Jamie. I thank the Auditor General for his evidence and Derek Hoy and Cornilius Chikwama for their input. We now need to consider what our next steps will be and who we might need to invite to give us more evidence on what is a really important subject from the point of view of both public policy and consumer interests.

With that, I draw to a close the public part of this morning’s proceedings.

We will have two evidence sessions this morning. First, we will consider the Auditor General for Scotland’s section 22 report entitled “The 2022/23 audit of NHS Forth Valley”.

I welcome our witnesses from NHS Forth Valley, who have joined us in the committee room. Amanda Croft is the interim chief executive. Alongside her is Janie McCusker, who is here on her last day as chair of the board. You are very welcome—thanks for joining us. Andrew Murray is the medical director on the board; Kevin Reith is the director of human resources; and Professor Frances Dodd is the executive nurse director.

The committee has quite a number of questions to put to you. Before we get to them, I ask Amanda Croft to make a short opening statement.

You refer to the note that you sent us in advance of your appearance here today. There was a lot of managerial jargon in it, and it was quite long. When it came to staff relations, it mainly just discussed whistleblowing. We all accept that whistleblowing is part of a suite of ways for the staff’s voices to be heard, but I would have thought that whistleblowing public interest disclosures were in extremis. As I read it, the point that is being made in the external reviews, including the HIS review, is that there are not good, normalised, routine communications with the staff—including through the staff trade unions, I presume. I do not know whether Mr Reith, as the human resources director, wishes to comment on that.

Perhaps Professor Dodd could come in briefly on the point about staff relations under the HIS report. Other questions about the report are still to come.

Before we finish up, I will take us back to the report that was produced 22 months ago by Healthcare Improvement Scotland following its unannounced inspection. For example, it reported that it had found a

“lack of documented risks assessments”;

and that

“the addition of a fifth bed within a four bedded bay”

created what it felt to be a breach of standard operating procedures; and so on. There were quite serious allegations about patient care.

HIS also spoke about the vacancy rate as being very high within certain staff groups, such as the registered nursing staff group, in which the vacancy rate was more than 10 per cent, and the medical staff group, in which the vacancy rate was 13.76 per cent.

Will you address those issues in turn and tell us what progress you have made in 22 months?

Where are we with staff vacancy rates and so on?