Workforce Planning Civic Participation Event
We move on to agenda item 4. I refer members to the buff-coloured—or peachy—committee paper HC/S2/03/17/5. Members have had a chance to read the paper, so I want to confirm whether or not they want to take the course of action that is outlined in the report. The report is not yet on the website, but it will be—I know that that is exciting for members. I will spend 10 minutes taking members' views.
I was interested to read that the participation services people think that
"most value would be derived from the event if it only involved health service stakeholders."
I think that everybody to whom it was suggested we speak was a health service stakeholder—technically, we are all health service stakeholders—so I do not understand what the participation services officers mean by that comment. They might mean that we should include only health service professionals or employees, but the paper goes on to mention
"public and patient group representatives",
so the event would involve people other than those whom I think participation services mean by "stakeholders." I am not quite clear about that.
Are there any other comments? We are discussing this item in formal session.
I am not against the committee's organising a civic participation event, but we are being steered away from this one and I think that we need more time. Should we take the participation services people's advice that the event would not be ideal for wider participation? The paper goes on to suggest that we might want to organise an event around the Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001. I am happy to be directed by such papers, but this one does not help me to make up my mind.
We do not have to run just one civic participation event; we could run two. A perfect time to have another civic participation event would be when we come to our post-legislative scrutiny of the Community Care and Health (Scotland) Act 2002.
The Health Committee should run more such events, because the issues that we consider are so huge and involve everybody: people might not be involved with the law frequently, but nearly everyone is involved with the health service at some point. We could discuss running an event such as that which Duncan McNeil suggested.
The clerk has passed to me a note about what participation services meant by public involvement at the proposed event. It was suggested that the general public could attend an open meeting, although it would be service professionals who were engaged in the meeting. I do not know whether that takes us anywhere.
I was concerned about the participation services officers' comments that
"most value would be derived from the event if it only involved health service stakeholders."
I feel strongly that patients—and the public in general, who are all potential patients—are health service stakeholders.
I will ask the clerk, Jennifer Clark—sorry, Jennifer Smart; I definitely need the recess—for clarification.
Perhaps it would be helpful if I explained what the participation services officers meant. They think that there would be great value in the event, but have reservations about how to structure it to get the best value from it if there is to be a totally open invitation to interested members of the public. The suggestion was not meant to exclude people; we were considering from where we could get best input on the subject matter.
Participation services felt that we could have another event on the regulation of care—there is no problem with our having two events—that would perhaps better lend itself to people's coming to add personal experiences of the situation before and after the Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001 was passed. The event that we are considering is perhaps slightly more focused on work-force planning—people might feel that they have had unhappy experiences of that. It is up to members, but the idea was that the second event would be structured in such a way that the committee would hear input from the public on the outcomes. People would be able to say whether they agreed with the outcomes and there would be an open session in which they could say what they would like the outcomes to be. People would not be excluded.
As far as the away day is concerned, I do not recollect agreeing to anything other than the principle that we should hold public participation events, because they have a valuable role and are a necessary part of the committee's work. However, the section on page 1 of the paper on what the inquiry is about is quite technical. The most important issue for me, at the first stage anyway, is that we get as much information as possible to allow us to examine what the Executive is doing and to go through all the bullet points on page 1 of the paper. They are quite technical and tend to be a wee bit away from the focus of a lot of the people who might come to a public event.
I have no objection to holding an event at the second stage, when we have something to put before people for their confirmation or argument. However, we cannot muddle up the two types of event. We are doing a technical job on the inquiry into work-force planning, although what we do with it might go to the public.
I could not disagree more with what has just been said. The whole point of the inquiry is to consider how work-force planning meets the needs and demands of patients—in other words, the general public. We are all patients and this is about public participation. We have just spent two hours grilling witnesses on public participation, but the first thing that we are going to do is say, "We're not having the public here—the inquiry's too technical. We don't want to involve the public, because they won't understand." That sort of approach is completely alien to what we are trying to achieve and I am flabbergasted that it is even being suggested.
I hate to do this to Mike Rumbles or anyone else on my team, but I have to say that I see where David Davidson is coming from. He is acknowledging that there is an appropriate time to involve the public; he is not dismissing the idea of the public's being involved. Among the crucial issues that have been raised with my local board—Fife NHS Board—is barriers to getting professionals; the shortage of skilled people has been the driving force behind the acute services reviews and the development of trusts in the past few years.
I do not want to pre-empt the discussion, but it is known that the royal colleges have restricted entry to medical services in the past few years. If we want to get to the heart of the matter, I would like to hear what they have to say. I am told that of the 16 royal colleges only three are in Scotland; the rest come under Westminster's remit. I want the colleges to give evidence, either at a public participation event or during an evidence-taking session. I certainly want us to hear from the public at the two stages. First we should have technical input, then wider public involvement at a later stage. That would be reasonable. When professionals give us advice, we can ignore it. We are paid to make a judgment and my judgment is that we should accept the advice that we have had from the professionals.
I thank Helen Eadie for clarifying my position. At no time did I say that the public should be excluded; rather, I said that the process had to be staged, as Helen Eadie kindly described. I do not understand why Mike Rumbles thinks that I am against public input on the subject, because that is not the case—it is a matter of time and place.
When the Justice 1 Committee held such an event, the public were present at the morning session, even though it was fairly technical. We could perhaps tweak the proposed arrangement for our event. The paper suggests that we could
"hold a morning session with invited professionals."
I am not necessarily saying that we should use the same structure as the Justice 1 Committee's event, but a lot of group work took place in the morning, in which—although it was technically oriented—ordinary members of the public were involved, so the public could be involved in the morning at our event. As the paper suggests, the afternoon session will have much more input from the public. I agree with Mike Rumbles that it is not proper that there should be a Red sea between the professionals and the public. I suggest that what happens in the morning will be more skewed towards the professionals, although the public could be there. The counterbalance will be the public's involvement in the afternoon session.
When members see the planning for such events, they will realise that the public's involvement is highly interactive rather than passive. In my first experience of a public participation event, I was surprised that the set-up worked; I had been sceptical about whether it would. I will let Mike Rumbles come back in after Shona Robison and Jean Turner.
I think that Mike Rumbles is getting himself overexcited about something that is not being suggested; I know that that is not like him.
That is a tautology, I think.
We are all in favour of public participation and we all want to be on Helen Eadie's team. The question is about the best way of organising the event to ensure that the public get something out of it. There is a real danger that if the event is too vague, broad and unstructured, the public will come along but not get much out of it.
We need to focus more on the structure and on what type of information members of the public will get; I cannot visualise how that will work. I can see the general idea, but I do not know what kind of experience the members of the public who come along will have. It would be helpful to have a bit more information on that because, as well as wanting the public to have a positive experience, we want to get something out of the event. After all, we are holding the event not only because it is the right thing to do, but because we want to hear the public's views on specific issues in the inquiry; we do not want general information about people's experiences. We must thrash out some more detail.
If we decide to proceed with the event and submit a bid for money, part of the issue might be resolved when we commission contracts from various parties. That will enable us to consider proposals for the structure of the event and to take a view on which course we want to follow. It is the job of those parties to structure the event and make it work. I agree that we do not want a cosmetic event; that would be pointless.
I was very impressed by the event that the Justice 1 Committee ran, which was highly structured. The public, who had had interaction with professionals in the work groups in the morning, had an awful lot to say. I do not know whether our event would go along those lines. At the bidding stage, we would have specific proposals in different bids.
Do you have something to add, Duncan?
I agree that we will get the focus that is missing at the moment when we consider specific proposals. We all agree that there needs to be a high level of public involvement, particularly because the event will be the launch of a major inquiry, rather than the beginning or the end of it. Whoever brings the event together needs to understand that we want to use it to launch nine months to a year of work. That aspect is missing from the paper; we are getting too involved in the detail.
The convener's idea was a good one. It would be nice for people who use the service to hear what the managers think about what they provide, given all the changes, and how they see the situation. Staff could be questioned as well as participants—whether patients or carers.
Moreover, now that the new community health partnerships are being introduced, it would be interesting to hear people's perceptions of the information that management has provided about them and how the new situation will affect people. I think that there is much to be gained from the exercise, because the public will feel that their existence is at least being acknowledged.
Our whole approach to this is wrong. As I said earlier, we have to remember that the whole point of this exercise is to
"review all workforce planning for all professionals within the health service and how this is being developed to meet the needs and demands of patients".
From colleagues' comments, it seems to me that we are approaching the matter from entirely the wrong direction. During this afternoon's session, people have been making comments such as "We need evidence from the professionals" and "Let's hear the managers". Well, I am sorry—we should not start off any examination of how to
"meet the needs and demands of patients"
at the other end of the spectrum. Of course everyone must be involved. However, if our aim is to achieve what we say we want to achieve, it is only common sense to start by asking simple and basic questions; for example, we should ask what are the needs and demands of patients. We should ask the public those questions and not rely on professional and managerial input. In any case, I find it strange that members' reaction has been "Well, the public can be there, too". I would like us—
That is not what we are saying.
I have just been listening to what has been said.
I would like us to be able to launch this programme, but I am not having a civic participation event in order to do so. Instead, we should go around the country, listen to what the general public has to say and then get input from professionals, managers and the like. If we are to meet the objective that we have set ourselves—which is
"to meet the needs and demands of patients"—
we should, for goodness' sake, find out what those needs and demands are. That is only common sense to me.
As the only member who has taken part in a civic participation event, I should point out that such events are not evidence-taking sessions. The event could be structured along the lines that are suggested in the first bullet point on page 2, which says:
"between 50 and 80 people would be an appropriate number of invitees who could work in small groups on different aspects of the remit and bring forward suggestions and possible solutions".
It is not the case that we would on the one hand have experts and on the other the public, who would be told to listen and then make their contributions. Everyone will work in groups on various issues and come back to present views on them. I do not want to pre-empt anything, but there was, in the civic participation event that I attended, more technical input in the morning session and it was not closed to members of the public. Other material—including anecdotal evidence—emerged from the interaction between groups in the afternoon. We are all full of such anecdotes and have ideas about what is wrong with the health service, the justice system and so on. However, I found that those views were tempered by sharing ideas during the morning session.
I certainly do not want an event at which we allow experts to give evidence, but patronise the public by telling them that they will get to say something in the afternoon. The event would be much more interactive during the morning session, with views raised and decisions made in the afternoon session. If we decide to bid for money for the event, we will be able to consider the various structures that the consultants will suggest. If we do not like the options and find that they are very close to the picture that Mike Rumbles has painted, we will not proceed with the event. I would certainly share Mike's views if that were to be the case. However, I do not think that the event will take that form—certainly no committee member wants that. Perhaps we are jumping extra fences; perhaps we should simply consider this broad paper and ask the clerks to bring something back to us. I feel that we all have views on the matter, but I am trying to bring the discussion to an end. I ask the clerk to say something about what she could bring back to the committee.
Today, we hope to get from the committee an idea about progressing the bid. After all, we have talked about the proposal only in principle so we really need to take it to the bidding stage, which will happen in January. That will allow us to go out to consultation. Once the bids are in, we will receive details about how to structure the event; we will have a much clearer idea of things. Indeed, as we go through the process, we can develop a programme of what we want, which we can discuss in committee before we take things to the bidding stage.
Are members content to take things to that stage?
I am content to do so. However, I want to put on record that I object to Mike Rumbles's trying somehow to portray himself as the public champion. [Interruption.] Excuse me, I am speaking. He is trying to portray himself as a public champion while saying that the rest of us do not want any public involvement in the event, although no one around the table has said such a thing. We all want the public's maximum involvement in the event. However, we want it to happen in a way that ensures that the public gets something out of it. If we are going to have a successful event, we need to listen to what people are saying, rather than hear something different. After all, committee members all want the same thing.
Yes. I think—
Convener—
No, Mike. I am ruling—
Convener—
No, Mike, I am sorry. I am in the chair and I am bringing this discussion to an end.
Convener—
Mike, I have ruled—
I want to respond to those comments. I think that that was a personal attack in the chamber.
I have ruled—
You are not convening the meeting appropriately—
I have ruled.
—by not allowing me to respond to a personal attack by Shona Robison—
I am sorry. Please turn off the microphones.
Meeting closed at 16:16.