Health and Sport Committee
Meeting date: Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Official Report
479KB pdf
Petition
Speech and Language Therapy (PE1384)
Agenda item 2 is consideration of PE1384. We need to decide whether we will return to the issue or communicate to the Scottish Government further issues that the petitioner has raised.
Do committee members have any comments on the petition?
I have a strong personal interest in speech and language therapy. To be honest, I found the COSLA response pretty unhelpful. It reads very much like a sloping-shoulders response.
I wonder whether the committee ought to go to local authority and NHS board level. Perhaps we should cherry pick a couple of NHS boards and local authorities that are attached to them. Perhaps we should consult the petitioner on which areas would be worth exploring.
We need to look into the matter further. The committee’s paper 3 recommends that we pick up the matter with the Scottish Government and examine it again during consideration of the proposed integration of adult health and social care bill. That is worth doing, but we need a bit more detail than the COSLA response gave us. The question is the best way to get that detail to inform our work.
I agree with Mark McDonald. The need for speech and language therapy is increasing, and it is clearly not available uniformly throughout the country, which it should be. It is important to find out a bit more detail about what is going on where. Therefore, I support what Mark McDonald suggests.
Speech and language therapy and occupational therapy are classic examples of professionals bridging two areas. With respect, asking for a report from one of those areas as opposed to a report from the other misses the point. I understand what Mark McDonald says about COSLA not being helpful—I agree with that—but they are joint services and the important thing is to get a report from them jointly. The fact that we cannot get that is a failure of the system.
I do not know whether anyone else on the committee was with me when we visited Glasgow’s speech and language therapy service, which has been completely redesigned with a budget of £5.2 million. People are happy with the redesigned joint service: it is working well.
It is a matter of asking the community planning partnerships or community health partnerships. They are the ones that should be able to tell us what is happening on the ground.
I do not want to be overly negative about COSLA, but there are some issues with its response. I appreciate that it may not want to give an analysis of the impact of cuts to education budgets on speech and language therapy, but it could give us some straightforward raw data about full-time equivalents in each local authority area. I hope that that would be straightforward for each local authority to provide, but it makes much more sense for COSLA as the umbrella organisation to collate that data. We could—hoping against hope—give it one more chance to do that, but I would have no qualms about writing to local authorities.
I have asked previously about access to psychologists for young people in Glasgow. Of course, the local authority employs educational psychologists and the health board employs psychologists. That is a separate issue, but Glasgow City Council had no problem with providing me with information about that, so individual local authorities might not have an issue with providing us with information about speech and language therapists. I am curious about why COSLA is resistant; perhaps it has misunderstood our request. We could go back and ask whether we can get numbers from local authorities for the past five years.
On the recommendations in the committee papers, I would think that we would return to the issue as a matter of course when we consider the integration of health and social care. I support what Mark McDonald said.
I take that point on board entirely. I also take on board Richard Simpson’s point. We would want to see data not only on the numbers of therapists but the numbers of people who require interventions, how long they have to wait and how that plays out throughout the country.
I am happy to go through community health partnerships if the committee feels that that is the best way to go, but the reason why I suggested local authorities is that, although we will return to the matter when we consider the integration of adult health and social care bill, there is an education input in speech and language therapy.
The one thing that we do not want to do is to leave the educational aspect of speech and language therapy out of the committee’s consideration, which we might run the risk of doing when we talk about health and social care integration. I know that this is not the Education and Culture Committee, but speech and language therapy is a health intervention at an educational level. We need to take cognisance of that when we deal with the matter.
There is an obvious consensus that we should seek further information.
I suggest that we speak to the petitioner. She represents the professional body, which might be best able to indicate from where we would be most likely to get the best response.
Thanks very much for that.