Health Committee, 21 Jun 2005

Meeting date: Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Official Report 120KB pdf

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“Building a Health Service Fit for the Future”

Agenda item 5 is a brief discussion about our evidence session with Professor Kerr. The Kerr group's report, "Building a Health Service Fit for the Future", was published on 25 May. At a previous meeting, the committee agreed to invite Professor Kerr to give oral evidence session. As is explained in the paper, Professor Kerr has offered Tuesday 20 September as the earliest date on which he will be available. I appreciate that some committee members may be disappointed that he cannot give evidence sooner, but we are entirely in his hands on that matter.

I invite the committee to agree to hold an oral evidence session with Professor Kerr on 20 September and to consider whether it wants to take evidence solely from Professor Kerr on that occasion or to consider inviting other witnesses as well. Let us first agree to have an oral evidence session with Professor Kerr on 20 September. Is everyone happy with that?

Members indicated agreement.

The next question is whether we wish the evidence session to be solely with Professor Kerr or whether we wish to invite other witnesses. I open the matter to discussion.

Might it be a good idea to keep things tight by also taking evidence from the Minister for Health and Community Care on that day? After our evidence session with Professor Kerr we could get an immediate response from the minister, who would be able to comment on any issues raised in the session with Professor Kerr.

I concur with that. It would be helpful to take evidence from the minister, but at this stage we should not widen the session to include other people. We need to see what comes out of the evidence session with Professor Kerr before we decide where we want to go.

I am happy to go along with that, on the proviso that we bear in mind the need for an opportunity to include people in a broader discussion. In particular, we should get feedback from people who took part in the event in the chamber. I hope that we can do that at a later stage.

I agree. I also agree that we should have Professor Kerr by himself and then Professor Kerr with the minister.

I am not sure what you are proposing. Is your proposal that we should take evidence from Professor Kerr on his own and then ask him to stay on while we take evidence from the minister?

Yes. If there were any immediate problems, we could deal with them then.

We would first need to get the minister to agree to attend on 20 September. I cannot guarantee that he will be available on that date. We have Professor Kerr's agreement to give evidence on 20 September, but that does not mean that the minister will be available. We will need first to establish whether the minister is prepared to come along on that basis.

Do members feel that it would be helpful to hear from Professor Kerr first and then to have the minister join Professor Kerr for an evidence session? I am not quite clear how that would work. Perhaps Jean Turner can explain her proposal a bit more.

We will definitely go ahead with hearing evidence from Professor Kerr on 20 September.

We have already agreed to that.

Are you suggesting that, if the minister could not attend on that day, we might need to change that date?

No. I am asking you to clarify your proposal. We have agreed that we will take evidence from Professor Kerr on 20 September. We have also agreed that we would like to take evidence from the minister. However, your suggestion seems to involve hearing from Professor Kerr first and then inviting the minister to sit with Professor Kerr for the second part of the meeting. I am not quite clear what you expect to get out of that second part.

Although we could have both Professor Kerr and the minister together as part of an open discussion, it might be good to have a session with Professor Kerr on his own, given that he has headed up all the hard work. I do not think that we should have the minister waiting at the side to come in during that discussion.

As we have all received copies of Professor Kerr's report, we will be able to read it at our leisure; we will have time to digest its contents. After we have read the report, we might find it helpful to have Professor Kerr and the minister present at the same time so that we can address our questions to either of them. That would allow some dialogue, almost like a round-table discussion.

The proposal is that we have a kind of mini round table for the whole session and that we do not take evidence from Professor Kerr on his own for any part of it. Are members happy with that? I am not sure that I am.

I am not sure that I am happy with that suggestion. We are dealing with someone else's agenda. It is unfortunate that we could not get Professor Kerr before the date that he specified.

Given that we have an opportunity to discuss the matter, I want to hear about the experiences of the many people who worked for Professor Kerr. The Kerr report is based on other people's work and if we are considering having a round-table discussion it might be more appropriate to invite Professor Kerr and some of the people who chaired subgroups, rather than Professor Kerr and the minister. Such an approach would generate a different set of questions than would a meeting at which we pitted Professor Kerr against the other Kerr—Kerr versus Kerr. I would like to hear how the subgroups came to their conclusions, which would be an important first step before we question the minister.

I thought that we had agreed to hear from Professor Kerr and then speak to the minister.

That is what I thought, too.

We would have a different set of questions for Professor Kerr if he was on his own. There is a danger that if the minister also attends we might not have as free a discussion as we had when Professor Kerr last gave evidence to the committee, which was helpful. If Professor Kerr was on his own, we could probe his thinking in a way that might not be possible if the minister was there answering questions on matters about which we would rather hear Professor Kerr's view. I would like the committee to have a dialogue with Professor Kerr and then to discuss some of the issues with the minister and ascertain what he wants to take forward. The minister might not agree with all Professor Kerr's recommendations and it would be good to thrash that out. We need two different evidence sessions.

It is clear to me that Professor Kerr should come before the committee on his own to answer our questions. However, subsequently, at the meeting on 20 September or at a different meeting, should we ask the minister to respond to our questions about Kerr? We should give Professor Kerr the courtesy of a session on his own to answer questions.

I agree with Shona Robison. We should hear from Professor Kerr. The minister should come on his own, so if he cannot come on 20 September it will not matter; he can come on another date.

I would rather hear from the minister on another day.

The consensus appears to be that we invite Professor Kerr to give evidence and reserve consideration of how we deal with the matter subsequently. As Duncan McNeil said, a great many subcommittees reported to the main Kerr report and many individuals and issues were involved in discussions, the detail of which did not make it into the report. We will want to consider inviting the minister at some point, but our discussions with Professor Kerr might suggest other areas that we want to consider.

For example, the centralisation of neurological services is being considered.

We might also want to consider the subcommittee on care. We will take evidence solely from Professor Kerr on 20 September—this is getting very complicated; we have had two Kerrs and a "care".