Chamber and committees

Thank you. We will come back to that with other members of the panel. I think that Ms Hiscox has something to contribute on that point.

Thank you.

Professor Smith, we are short of time and we have a couple of questions on other subjects, but you can give us a quick comment.

In the few minutes that we have left, I would like to address issues in relation to ill health. We have heard a lot about, and received many submissions about, prevention, so it obviously will get a lot of discussion but, while we have the witnesses here, I would like to ask two things—to Caroline Hiscox, in the first instance.

The first is about long-term conditions, of which there are a lot. There is a long-term conditions framework, and 100,000 people live with either myalgic encephalomyelitis or long Covid in Scotland—that is a lot of people, who are getting very little help.

I would love to see some people preventing things that are not being prevented and that are not related to people changing their lifestyle. It is great to talk about and try to bring in prevention, but that will take 20 to 30 years; in the meantime, we have people—a lot of them of working age—who are costing the country billions. I know that there is some money for that—indeed, some of it has come to Lothian. Could you share with us what is being done differently for those people, who are sometimes not patients but just sufferers?

That would be great—thanks.

I have one more question, which I think we have time for. It is about money for infrastructure, and specifically the Queen Elizabeth university hospital. An inquiry is ongoing, with £30 million having been spent on it. People have died, and the health board has now said that, on the balance of probabilities, the faults in the hospital contributed to that. Those faults are not solved. I was in the hospital at the weekend, and it is in a shocking state. There is scaffolding up, and cladding and fire doors are missing.

I know that you are not in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, but there have been problems elsewhere as well. I ask you, in your capacity as chair of the executive group: what needs to be done urgently, and when will it be done? I do not think that there was anything in the programme for government on that, although I am happy to be corrected. If that is the case, what do the professional groups see as a responsibility in terms of doing something about that issue now? The issue is not about prevention; it is about people who are immunosuppressed going into that hospital—the parents are terrified to take those kids in.

There has not been enough talk about that issue, although it is something that the committee will, I hope, want to come back to. We have all this talk about prevention, but what are we going to do about the infrastructure? Are we suggesting that £X million or £X billion should be spent?

I will follow up on that. First, you have taken an east and west approach. Do you think that that will probably be the model that will be used? I have heard that there can be problems with that. I point to the fact that Inverness is included in the west, which is a bit of an odd way to divide the map of Scotland, and that Aberdeen, which actually is in the east, is included in the east. Anybody who comes from those areas—I come from the north—knows that Inverness and Aberdeen are in the north and that the north is quite different from the central belt.

I have been told by senior doctors that there have been problems because of that arrangement. If the system of two health boards goes ahead, how will it address that issue?

I ask for a brief answer, so that we can move on to other topics.

I welcome the next witnesses; thank you for coming in to give us your views and answer our questions on your various specialties. We have with us Lilian Macer, the Scottish secretary at Unison, Dr Nóra Murray-Cavanagh, the assistant director of the Royal College of Nursing—[Interruption.]

My apologies—I slipped lines in my briefing. I need to drink my tea.

Dr Murray-Cavanagh is from the BMA. It is Eileen McKenna who is from the Royal College of Nursing Scotland. Charlotte Waite is from the British Dental Association Scotland and Glenn Carter is from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and the Allied Health Professionals Federation Scotland. I got that bit right.

We are short of time so I will not ask witnesses to give opening statements. I hope that you will get across what you want to say in response to our general questions. If not, I hope that there will be time at the end of the session for you to put your points forward.

Mr Carter, do you want to share your perspective on workforce planning?

I appreciate that, but the population of Scotland has gone up by 370,000 in 20 years, so it would have been good if we had been planning for that extra number. However, as the number of beds has gone down, we know enough to know that we will need more.

In the interim, can you reassure any parents who might still be wondering whether the Royal hospital for children and young people in Edinburgh is safe for use that it is not suffering the same problems that we still see at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital?