Health and Community Care Committee, 06 Sep 2000

Meeting date: Wednesday, September 6, 2000

Official Report 300KB pdf

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Conferences

We have received requests for members of the committee to take part in conferences. If any member has a particular interest in attending any of the conferences that are listed in the paper that has been circulated, they should say so.

I have already accepted an invitation to attend the CVS Scotland conference in Aviemore. I will take part in the panel session there, although I will not be there for both days of the conference.

That conference is on a Wednesday, so if other members wish to attend it they will have to be away from Parliament on that day. I suggest that it is enough that Mary Scanlon attends.

I have accepted the invitation, but my attendance will depend on the business that is arranged for the chamber. I would have to pull out if there were a health debate on that day.

All of us are in the same position. Aviemore is in Mary Scanlon's area, so it makes sense for her to go to the conference there, if she is happy to attend as the representative of the committee.

The conference on hepatitis C will now take place on 25 October. I am happy to attend that conference, with the proviso that I do not have to speak to Executive policy—originally the organisers had asked the minister to speak about Executive policy and so on. I will speak on some of the concerns of the committee on the issue. With that caveat, I am happy to speak at that conference.

The Lothian and Borders voluntary organisation forum, which is meeting in Perth, has asked whether a member of the committee will be in the audience—we are not being asked to participate. We will say that we will accept one place, and any member who is interested in attending can e-mail the clerks. If no member indicates that they wish to attend, I will try to attend. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.

While we are talking about junkets—

Junkets? Can we ask for that word to be scratched from the Official Report?

There is, in the committee, a tremendous interest in public health in Finland. I would like to register my interest in that project.

The researchers have been working on the paper that we commissioned. I anticipate that we will get that quite early in the next term. We can consider then what action we want to take.

I believe that there is some sort of open week in Finland in November during which people can visit various projects. I do not want that to slip from our minds.

We will come back to the matter after the recess when we have the research note.

Is Mary Scanlon suggesting that we might want to visit Finland? From my experience of similar arrangements with the European Committee, I know that if we leave it until after the recess, we would probably not get approval to go because that process is lengthy. My approval took nine weeks.

So far, we have had no difficulty getting the go-ahead for anything that we have wanted to do.

For visits outwith Scotland, the process involves the Parliamentary Bureau, the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body and the conveners liaison group. One group usually deals with it the week after another has.

We have not debated the issue and if we ask for approval before we have done so, it might look as if what we really want is a trip to Finland. After we have seen the report from the researchers and decided whether we want to go to Finland, we will arrange that in our own way, and structure it around our needs. We should not simply hop on to something that is already going on. It might be that we are able to visit Finland for the open week, but we would have to make sure that we had a good reason for doing so.

Could we ask an already hard-pressed person to get some detailed information from Finland on its projects?

Yes. That is what the researchers are working on. I discussed the matter with them last week. They are doing research papers on the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and on hepatitis C, as well as on public health in Finland. A lot of work is being done behind the scenes by the Scottish Parliament information centre's researchers.