Health and Sport Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Official Report 630KB pdf

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Petitions

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Mental Health Services (PE1611)

Item 5 on our agenda is consideration of two petitions. The first petition is PE1611, in the name of Angela Hamilton, on mental health services in Scotland. The petition was lodged on 27 July 2016.

Members will be aware of the previous work carried out by the committee on the petition, as detailed in paper 5 for today’s meeting. The committee agreed to consider the petition as part of its previous work on mental health. We wrote to Sir Harry Burns in his role as the chair of the review of targets and indicators, to make him aware of the petition and its request for a reduction in mental health waiting times.

Members will also be aware of the recent commitment from the Scottish Government in its proposed budget. In a letter to the committee on 23 January, the cabinet secretary stated that

“overall funding for mental health services will amount to £1.1 billion in 2019-20.”

Colleagues will also note that the committee will undertake an inquiry into primary care in 2019, which will include consideration of mental health.

In light of those points and the fact that the petition is now some two and a half years old, I invite members to consider whether it would be appropriate to close the petition at this stage in order to focus on other aspects of mental health services. Do members have any comments?

I appreciate the amount of work that has gone into the petition, having sat on the Public Petitions Committee many years ago.

I would be minded to close the petition in light of what you have said, convener, about the Scottish Government’s commitment to extra resources, as well as the age difference in relation to child and adolescent mental health services, which is important. Most important, given that the petition is more than two years old, it does not reach the same level as our inquiry into primary care will. However, we should also include evidence from the petition as part of our inquiry, if that is acceptable to the committee.

I sit on the Public Petitions Committee, to which an increasing number of petitions are being submitted that have a mental health element and so are pertinent to our consideration of PE1611. That is quite concerning. The Public Petitions Committee is considering how to gather the separate petitions together into a wider piece of work. If we close the petition and put it aside, there is a very good chance that many of those other petitions will come to the Health and Sport Committee and members will go over the ground again. Could we suspend the petition? There is a lot of work coming down the line on the topic and the petition is still pertinent.

If there are no other comments, I will respond to that point. You are right that increasing attention will be paid to these issues in the future and we can expect further petitions. The question is whether our scrutiny of policy in the area should be based on the more current petitions as opposed to one that was submitted some time ago.

I am not aware of the petitions that Brian Whittle has referred to, but I suggest that, if it is possible for the Public Petitions Committee to group them so that we can consider them together, that would be useful.

That is exactly what we are doing just now. We are trying to pull together elements in common and bring the petitions together as a much bigger piece of work. Inevitably, that work will land on the Health and Sport Committee.

I endorse what Miles Briggs has just said. It is important to recognise that mental health is a very dynamic landscape, although it is not necessarily one of improvement.

The fact that the petition has been before the committee for two and a half years concerns me slightly, because the debate has moved on and I think that we are backsliding in some areas around mental health. If we closed the petition, it would not be because we think that the issue is sorted—far from it—but because we recognise that there have been developments in the area on which we will receive representations from the Public Petitions Committee and to which we should devote our attention.

I take on board members’ comments, especially those of Brian Whittle, in which he noted that lots of petitions relating to mental health are coming forward. I would be interested in a collaborative approach that looked at the evidence. The Minister for Mental Health has made announcements committing to spending money, especially for young people and schoolchildren, so I would be interested in taking a broader approach to scrutinising what has been announced and what will be delivered. Mental health is really high on everyone’s agenda right now.

Thank you very much. I suggest that we agree to close the petition, but that we draw our decision to the attention of the Public Petitions Committee, which will consider how best to group the petitions in front of it and may wish to take that into account. Do members agree?

Members indicated agreement.

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NHS Centre for Integrative Care (PE1568)

The second petition before us is PE1568, in the name of Catherine Hughes, on funding for, access to and promotion of the NHS centre for integrative care. The petition was lodged on 12 May 2015.

Members will be aware that, as is detailed in today’s public papers, the committee agreed at our meeting on 15 November 2016 to invite the Scottish Health Council to give oral evidence on its general input and approach to consultations of the type being run in this case, as well as on its involvement in the classification of major service changes. I wrote to the chief executive of NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde on 28 November 2018 to request an update on the centre and on whether any further changes to the service were anticipated. The response from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde is included in today’s papers, along with letters in support of the petition from Elaine Smith MSP, the British Homeopathic Association and other concerned parties, including the petitioner herself.

I invite comments from colleagues.

I thank the petitioners, the campaigners and those who have sent us correspondence. Catherine Hughes and her mother are here today; I know that they have not been well over the winter, so it is good to see them here.

There is a lot of important work that we still need to take forward. I am a co-chair of the cross-party group on chronic pain, and I know that Elaine Smith’s correspondence raises on-going issues relating to the variation in treatment available across Scotland. As the Friends of the Centre for Integrative Care has outlined, keeping the petition open would allow time for correspondence to continue and investigations to take place, so I would be reluctant to close it. I look towards the work of the cross-party group, but also towards any work that our committee could undertake on the matter.

Further to Miles Briggs’s comments, I chair the cross-party group on arthritis and musculoskeletal conditions, which does quite a lot of work with the cross-party group on chronic pain. As always seems to be the case, there is—without question—a much bigger piece of work to be done. A much bigger outcome is possible; the question is how to fit it in and whether it should be dealt with by cross-party groups or by our committee.

Unlike PE1611, PE1568 will not be followed by a glut of similar petitions to the Public Petitions Committee; it relates to a stand-alone issue. I am anxious about closing it, because that would suggest that the issue had been resolved. I am not sure that we are at that stage yet, or anywhere near it, so I endorse Miles Briggs’s recommendation that we keep the petition open.

As I said earlier, I have been involved in this area with others for around the past 10 years. It concerns me that the petition was lodged in 2015 but has just come to the Health and Sport Committee now, four years down the line. That alone is a concern for me.

Many issues have been raised. One person says that the out-patient service is still open whereas somebody else says that it is closed. We need evidence of exactly what is happening.

I refer to what Brian Whittle said. In the evidence session earlier, we talked about the integration of health and social care. The issue should be part of that. There is a much bigger issue.

I do not know how we can move on with the petition. Miles Briggs mentioned the cross-party group on chronic pain, which I know about. Dorothy-Grace Elder has also been involved in it. Perhaps the issue could be discussed there.

I am pretty loth to close the petition, but I do not know where we can go with it. It is not just about the centre at Gartnavel; it is about much bigger integration. A counselling and dietary service is mentioned. Surely that should be provided in every health authority.

For clarity, the petition was lodged in 2015 and referred to this committee, and the committee took evidence in 2016. We pursued the issue last year, as well. Therefore, the petition has not arrived at the committee for the first time.

The committee has to decide whether there is anything further that it can add to the consideration of the specific matter.

Over the past couple of years as an MSP, I have attended many events in my constituency and in the Parliament that have been related to different aspects of pain management, myalgic encephalomyelitis and fibromyalgia, which are related to the petition. My main focus is on evidence-based approaches to the delivery of best care, whether in the community or health service settings, and I am reluctant to simply close the petition without seeing a resolution. I am interested in a way to ensure that we have the wider ability to look at all the other issues that have come forward in the past couple of years.

Like other members, I, too, have served on the Public Petitions Committee for a number of years. I praise the work that Catherine Hughes has done in the petition and endorse the thorough letter that Elaine Smith has issued, albeit at the 11th hour. She has made a very strong point. She said that it is

“vital that this petition remains open so that we can put patients first”.

She also stressed that the problem is Scotland wide and not just to do with a local area.

I agree with the comments that colleagues have made.

There must be some way in which to pull together the work that various groups have done on the topic into something a little more cohesive. There is not much point in repeating the work that has already been done. I would look for the committee not necessarily to do a great bit of investigation but perhaps to be a catalyst to pull together a lot of the work that has been done into something a bit more solid and cohesive.

The Scottish Government has outlined an advisory group that is meant to be undertaking work on postcode lottery issues, so there is an opportunity. That information has not been made available to the cross-party group. I welcome the fact that the cabinet secretary will come to our cross-party group to outline some of that work, but there is an opportunity to use what the petition looks at to ask the Scottish Government what it will do with what comes out of the advisory group. It is important for the outcome of the petition to find out where the future of the centre for integrative care sits. That would be useful for the petitioner to see whether there are questions in the petition that we could take forward with the Government.

Emma Harper should be very brief.

I will be.

I am reminded that, the week before last week, I attended an event about migraines. How we support people with migraines is a postcode lottery. That issue is along the same lines. We should consider a whole, integrated approach that supports people throughout Scotland.

It is clear that the committee does not wish to close the petition. However, rather than coming back to the petition again in a year’s time to ask what has happened in the previous 12 months, I suggest that we write to the cross-party groups that have an interest in the matter—at least two such groups have been mentioned—to say that the Health and Sport Committee is keen to understand what they can do to advance the issues that have been raised, and to ask them to report back to us. On receipt of those replies, we can make a judgment on what we can usefully add. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

We move into private session.

12:15 Meeting continued in private until 12:29.