Chamber and committees

I go back to addressing the needs of people who are vaccine hesitant. What work has been done to ensure that those people are not excluded from everyday activities because of their concerns around vaccination passports? We should not create a two-tier system.

Are you saying that we MSPs must temper the way we talk to one another in the chamber?

Do you accept that it is inherently dangerous—I am reluctant to use that word—to compare what we are doing with what is happening around the world, when such a wide variety of approaches are taken to measuring, for example, the number of people who, tragically, have died from the disease?

I am not looking at the position across the country; I am talking only about my area, where it seems to be an issue.

Finally, on Alex Rowley’s point about access to GPs, there is variation across the country in that regard. I have tried to get an elderly relative an appointment with their GP. They still have not seen their GP; they ended up in hospital. However, when my parents phone up their GP, it is easy for them to get an appointment. There is a wide variation in access to GPs across the country.

I know that we cannot force GPs to do things that they do not want to do, but given the huge variation across the country, the situation should be continually monitored.

An issue that I have been on about for a while is that of the vaccination status of other countries and how vaccine proliferation is measured in other countries. How can we be confident that the data that comes out of other countries is robust? I am always wary of making comparisons with other countries, because the way in which they measure their vaccination status varies hugely across the world. How can we be confident that the data that we get from other countries in relation to the travel zone is robust?

Constituents have raised a couple of points with me, one of which relates to the warning period for a change in a country’s status as regards travel. Sometimes, the status of a country that people have travelled to changes while they are there so they face a mad scramble to get home again. Is a change of timescale being considered so that people are not caught out in that way?

Another issue that NHS professionals have raised with me is the pressure on the NHS caused by absenteeism because of people getting regularly pinged by test and protect. I have heard about cases of neonatal units where there are supposed to be 12 people on duty, but there are only three. Such situations are inherently dangerous and relate to the impact of non-Covid-related incidents. Where are we with that? How we are measuring the situation and keeping on top of it?

Thank you, cabinet secretary. We are probably broadly aligned with regard to my line of questioning, but I am looking ahead at how we will come out the other side. Covid has exacerbated problems—for example, levels of obesity have increased. That brings me on to my second question.

The increased pressure on the NHS is, without question, part of the jigsaw. I was struck by the suggestion from one of our previous witnesses that the worst way to tackle mental health problems is to firefight and end up having to treat them with drugs. The other day, I asked the cabinet secretary about staffing issues, which have been exacerbated by Covid. There are many more absentees in our health service than there normally are. Many more students are applying for medical courses than there are places on offer in universities and colleges, and the Covid recovery will require significant long-term workforce planning. Where is the Scottish Government on collecting data on that and looking ahead to what the demand will be and how it will match that demand with a further increase in staffing?

I have three questions. The convener suggested that the number 1 threat to the health of the nation would be if the data-gathering and digital cybersecurity issue became serious. On the back of that, I want to look ahead in relation to Covid recovery, and probably further ahead than we have been talking about. I am interested in the impact on the Covid death rate of other health conditions. We are aware that conditions such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have a significant impact on the Covid death rate. I wonder whether it is time to rationalise that fact. Perhaps this is the time to draw a line in the sand and take a significant step forward on the preventative health agenda by tackling conditions such as obesity and diabetes, which will have the biggest impact on future death rates when there are pandemics, whether they are caused by Covid or something similar to it. What work is the Scottish Government doing or considering on that issue?

The cabinet secretary talks about the acute response to Covid that is currently required. We cannot overstate how important that is, but I want to consider where we will move to after that.

I go back to data gathering. Data is important to the longer-term study of the impact of Covid. I am interested in the impact on the black, Asian and minority ethnic community, the fact that we have a smaller BAME community here than there is down south, and whether that has had an impact on the numbers. We have a fairly poor health record in Scotland. I am interested in what impact that has had on the Covid data. We have talked about ethnicity in relation to the uptake of the vaccine and the variation in uptake in Scottish index of multiple deprivation areas.

If we consider the reactions of Governments at the start of the pandemic as the virus made its way across the world, we would agree that Governments did not react as quickly as they could have. All that data needs to be gathered.

Where are we on data gathering and pulling together all those issues to look at how we will come out of the other side of the pandemic and how we will prevent, as much as we possibly can, something similar happening again?