Chamber and committees

Dr Buist, we know that we were short of some 860 GPs before the pandemic. We were working towards having multidisciplinary teams and more community care. A lot of that was put on hold because of the pandemic. However, the pandemic resulted in a rapid deployment of technology. As we recover from the crisis, will the continued deployment of technology help doctors with the backlog and the development of future policy?

I thank the witnesses for their answers. It is certainly a concern. I have always thought that the first step should be to look after the health and wellbeing of those who look after us.

Mr Morrison, you described a system that was creaking and not working pre-pandemic, and you are suggesting that it is now down at about half its capacity. Can you catch up while the Covid measures are in place? First and foremost, do we have to accept that, under the current conditions, it will be nigh on impossible to catch back up to where we were pre-pandemic? What needs to happen to return to a balanced operating system? Linked to that, is there an opportunity to reassess and redesign the system on the basis of learning from Covid?

Good morning. I will start with a very general question. I always think that, if we are to have a working healthcare sector, we need to look at the morale and health of the professionals in the sector. What is the situation in that respect compared to what it was pre-pandemic?

What I am hearing in that reply is that you are unable, in the three-week review process, to ascribe an increase in vaccine uptake specifically to the impact of any of the measures. Given that vaccine uptake is one of the most important things in tackling the virus, and given the amount of resource that has been deployed into vaccination passports and the problems with those passports—both practical and in relation to human rights—it is really important that you are able to persuade the population that a vaccination passport scheme is the right way to go, but I am not hearing that, cabinet secretary.

I want to move on but, from a science perspective, we do not know by how much vaccine uptake would have increased without a vaccination passport scheme. That is the issue.

Given that specific groups are less well vaccinated than others—for example, we know that fewer people in the African population are vaccinated—how are those demographic groups being targeted?

I will be brief, because a lot of the points have been covered. Everybody recognises the importance of ventilation, not just for Covid but for many other considerations, as well as the fact that CO2 monitoring would be beneficial. I am thinking about the practicalities of developing a country where the buildings have good ventilation. As the convener said at the start of the discussion, we know that poverty is a major driver of proliferation of the virus. The practicalities of developing all our buildings so that they have good ventilation is beyond the Government’s budget, so I presume that we are talking about a focus on commercial rather than domestic properties.

I will follow on from some of Murdo Fraser’s points. As you said, cabinet secretary, there were four bullet points giving the reasons for the implementation of the vaccination passport scheme, one being to improve vaccine uptake. It is my view that improving vaccine uptake will improve the other three bullet points by reducing transmission, reducing the effects of illness, the number of deaths and the pressures on the NHS, and, we hope, helping to keep places open.

However, I was concerned to hear one of the committee’s advisers use the phrase “evaluating blind” this morning. Given that we are looking for the most effective deployment of resource, how can we assess the impact of vaccination passports? We have to be able to assess their impact on vaccine uptake, because we have always said that we follow the science. The Government is taking a suite of measures, but it cannot just be a matter of throwing as much as we can at the situation and hoping that we have an outcome.

We also need to target people who are vaccine hesitant. How are we addressing the needs of those people? Pushing harder is likely to result in more entrenched views so, given that vaccination passports will not persuade that group to get vaccinated, what is the Scottish Government doing to speak to those people?

I will ask a quick final question, if I may, convener. Has the Scottish Government decided what the criteria will be for withdrawing the passport scheme?

For the record, I am not necessarily against vaccination passports, but I need to understand their implementation and that resources are being used as best they can be in tackling the issue.