Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
Search by MSP
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
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Displaying 528 contributions
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Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 15 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
The witnesses have covered my second question.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 15 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
Self-referral might not be the best pathway for some people and might lead them down the wrong avenue, so how can we ensure that they access the most appropriate health practitioner for their needs?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
My questions are about service design. We often hear from the public that they have not been involved in the changes to GP services. To what extent, and in what way, has the public been involved in co-designing primary care services? How has the general practice workforce been involved?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
Good morning, panel, and thank you for your contributions so far. My questions are on digital services. Do you feel that patients have—and do patients feel that they have—direct control over their health with such services? How can we improve them? That question is for Val Costello in the first place and then anyone else who wants to come in.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
We have heard evidence that the public are accessing digital services a lot more and, indeed, have done so during the pandemic, but I have heard comments this morning about the move away from that to people going back to their GPs more often and so on. How are we going to get the message out about alternative pathways, doing things slightly differently, digital services and so on? I think that Val Costello touched on that, and I wonder whether she has any more thoughts on the matter.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
I was in the same group as Stephanie Callaghan and I thought that the session was really good. The responses were quite a mixed bag. I took from the session that people were quite positive that there were alternative pathways, but the big issue is access and how to get the message across to inform people that alternative pathways are available. There was much discussion about how we could do that better.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
My other question has been covered, convener.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Alternative Pathways to Primary Care
Meeting date: 8 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
I want to follow up Dr Williams’s point about training. He said that it is quite difficult to set aside days on which to close practices for training and so on. Is there a general issue with training and planning, and with having time to look to the future? Even if we get the communication right on alternative pathways, will GPs actually have time for that training?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Tackling Alcohol Harms
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
Good morning and thank you for all your contributions so far; it has been a really helpful session.
What are your views on the split of resources between alcohol treatment services and drug services? Do you feel that the split of resources is appropriate? That question goes to Lucie Giles.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Tackling Alcohol Harms
Meeting date: 1 March 2022
Evelyn Tweed
Thank you for that. I know that you have touched on this in your previous answers, but how can the effectiveness of public spend on alcohol services be assessed? What information is required to allow that assessment to be made, and how can we do it better? The question is for Alison Douglas.
