Chamber and committees

I am interested in the panel’s thoughts regarding the patient safety commissioner having sufficient powers to bring about improvements in patient safety. We already have the Scottish patient safety programme, which has been widened to look at maternity and neonatal primary care, paediatrics and medicines. I was part of the surgical safety stuff when I worked in the operating theatre in California, implementing the surgical safety checklist and things like that. Will the patient safety commissioner have enough powers to make safety improvements?

I do not have anybody in particular in mind.

I have a quick question. Looking at the report on your first 100 days, I see that concerns have been raised about electroconvulsive therapy and Covid vaccination. I am the co-convener of the cross-party group on mental health, and the ECT issue has come up with us, as well. There is a lot of fake news out there about Covid vaccines. Will your role help with concerns where evidence issues need to be addressed? Will it combat fake news, for instance?

Earlier, you talked about the value of your independence, and you are talking about listening to people and hearing their concerns. Are you already finding that people are engaged with and have trust in the role of patient safety commissioner for England that has been created?

In a previous evidence session, one of our panellists spoke about the Health and Safety Executive, enforcement orders and fines, and the patient safety commissioner’s potentially having those sorts of powers. Do you have any thoughts or opinions on whether the patient safety commissioner should be able to act in that way?

I welcome the witnesses to the Scottish Parliament—it is good to have you here. I am interested in how your remit and role compare with the proposed remit of the patient safety commissioner for Scotland, which seems to be a bit wider. Do you have an opinion on whether there would be any benefits or drawbacks of the remit being a bit different in Scotland? Has your remit given you enough to work on, without considering wider issues?

I did not think that I would be talking about roads in Dumfries and Galloway—the A75 and the A77—at a meeting of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, but the issue is relevant to the many challenges with recruitment and retention.

We must remember that we have the Scottish graduate entry medicine programme. It would be really good to hear how that is working. What is the retention level? Where is that programme doing well? That is part of it. There are also programmes for trained general nurses to become midwives and vice versa, although that is not happening in my part of the South Scotland region because Dumfries and Galloway was not selected for the dual training approach.

Work is being taken forward, but it will not be an overnight fix. I support doing whatever we need to do to look at rural health and social care.

What Matthew McClelland said is pretty clear. I do not like the idea of a patient safety commissioner who would create an adversarial and defensive environment. I agree that a patient safety commissioner should promote patient safety.

Are there any additional powers that might need to be included in the bill, for example around naming a health board, company or business? Is anything like that missing from the bill?

Okay, thank you.

People have also intimated that the patient safety commissioner’s role should be about healthcare, not health and social care. However, if we move towards having a national care service, which would encompass the whole of a patient’s care journey, would you expect the remit to be wider and to include social care down the line?

Good morning, everybody. I have a quick question about the remit of the patient safety commissioner. Sometimes the impact of care or—I should say—unsafe care is not directly or overtly evident. I note that Dr Williams suggested that the commissioner’s remit should include advocating for patients. I am thinking of groups or populations in which harm has occurred as a result of, say, a lack of compassion or some other issue that is not directly related to safety. Would you expect the patient safety commissioner’s remit to be wide enough to cover the patient population to whom overt harm might not have been caused?