Chamber and committees

I am a toonser from the north-east rather than a country boy but, as I pointed out, I well understand the difficulties that often exist in accessing services in rural and island communities.

We have to adapt service delivery. Boards are often best placed to know their areas, but we want to make sure that, in shaping those services, we listen to women and families when they tell us what they need. The Grampian resilience hub, which I mentioned, might be a solution that can be replicated elsewhere. I think that such a solution would work as well in Dumfries and Galloway as it does in rural Aberdeenshire.

As colleagues who heard me speak in my previous role will know, I am a great believer in exporting best practice. Where we find best practice, we will spread it far and wide. Hugh Masters and his team on the board have been doing that anyway, but we will continue to do it. As I said, we will also continue to look for nuggets of information from service users about what works for them and we will try to replicate that across the board.

In this regard, as in every other area, we will look at the best practice. Delivery will need to be adapted for certain parts of the country, but we will try to ensure that services are shaped by the voices and opinions of lived experience.

I should say to the committee that we have just engaged our second participation officer to link with minority ethnic communities and other equality groups, as part of our work in listening to the voices of lived experience. Hugh Masters mentioned resources that we have given to the Amma women’s group. We also have the experts by experience reference group, which is working with Amina—the Muslim Women’s Resource Centre to understand their challenges better. With our small grants funding, we have also funded multicultural family days for peer support.

The equality impact assessments that we did highlighted stigma around perinatal mental health issues among BAME groups, but that stigma exists across all communities. We have a huge amount of work to do across the board to destigmatise those issues. That is going to take a lot of work, and we all need to work together to ensure that there is a greater understanding of the needs of women and families in that area. I am grateful to the committee for carrying out this inquiry, because your findings will add to the information that we already have.

Then we will have to act accordingly. We have a situation in which some women feel so stigmatised that they cannot even go into a bookshop to buy a book with the information about how they are feeling. The small grants funds and the work of LATNEM women and others who are recognising these kinds of issues are ensuring that folks have easy access to such things. All of us should be working together to destigmatise mental health issues, whether in the BAME community or in other communities across the board.

Those are additional practitioners across all services. Those psychological practitioners will cover a range of services. It is extremely important that we get it right in this area, as in others. Having kept a very close eye on recruitment, I think that we are doing well. We also have to ensure that we retain those folks as we move forward, and we need to grow for the future.

I do not have the information at my fingertips on who is accessing all those modules, but we can get back to the committee with the information that we hold. Hugh Masters has put an R in the box, so he can perhaps come in with some more detailed information.

As I said to Ms Mochan, we have worked with NHS Education for Scotland to embed perinatal mental health in undergraduate education, to increase the number of psychology trainees at postgraduate level, and to roll out the suite of materials that has been mentioned to make them accessible to all professionals across Scotland. The aim is to further develop expertise at all levels across specialist and universal services. Importantly, we have committed to investment in perinatal and infant mental health services beyond the life of the programme board, which will allow health boards to recruit the required staff on permanent contracts and will support the recruitment and retention of staff and the development of centres of expertise.

That expertise is grand—it is brilliant—but we also want others to be able to access the kind of educational materials that Emma Harper has talked about. We have made that possible. If Hugh Masters does not have the details on who is accessing the training, we will write to the committee on that.

Convener, a very clever person has managed to get me some figures, which show that 700 practitioners have completed the stigma module alone.

Would it be appropriate to make some opening remarks before answering your question, convener?

Convener, you are right to point out that we are talking about remobilisation here, but folks have put in a hard shift over the course of all of this. Some services were disbanded during Covid, but the vast bulk of folk who were in those services moved and worked elsewhere. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to those who have kept our most vulnerable folk cared for during these very tricky 20 months.

I am sorry to repeat myself, but we are in a precarious time. In fact, it is the most precarious time. It would be fair to say that, in many areas, there are staff shortages. Some of that is down to illness and some of it is down to the fact of Brexit. One service that I spoke to had lost 40 per cent of its staff, who returned to their home countries after Brexit. That is inevitably going to have an impact.

We also know, because we have heard the stories, that other folks have left social care for the moment because they are tired and they have gone into what they see as easier jobs in hospitality. I hope—I think that we all hope—that those folks come back, and the national care service proposal gives us an opportunity to consider national pay bargaining for them, with a real hard look at pay and conditions and, beyond that, at opportunities for career progression.

We all have a duty to recognise that care is a profession. We have a wee bit of education to do with some folk around that, but we should continue—and I hope that the committee will continue—to refer to it as a profession as we move forward.

I turn to Ms Bell to talk about the folk who are involved in the remobilisation plan because I cannot remember off the top of my head.

I disagree profoundly with Dr Gulhane that Covid has not had an impact: it most definitely has. He should spend some time talking to folks with lived experience and the folk who work in front-line services about the impact that it has had.

His point about digital services is important. During the past period we have adapted quickly, and digital services are among the things in which we have invested. Cognitive behavioural therapy has been provided, which has worked well for many folk. We will continue to invest in digital services.

There is no doubt that digital services work well for many people, but there will still be a need for group therapies and individual face-to-face consultations, as we move forward. We can learn a lot from what we have gone through, so we are considering how to embed that in services in order to create hybrid provision where it is required. However, as always, we need to take a person-centred approach and to see what is best for the individual. Much of that is down to what clinicians think is best for the individual.

Without a doubt, lessons have been learned from the pandemic: we will take full advantage of the technological changes that we have made to get treatment right for people.

I know that folk canna wait, and that is why we have already made additional investment. I will just run through some of that, if you do not mind, convener.

We invested an extra £1.1 million in the short breaks fund through Shared Care Scotland last year, and £300,000 in our Young Scot young carers package to support carers of all ages to enjoy some time away. As we know, however, some folk will not do that, so we need to encourage it. This year, we have already committed an extra £570,000 for the short breaks fund.

We also recently launched the £1.4 million ScotSpirit holiday voucher scheme for tourism businesses to sign up to help low-income families, unpaid carers and disadvantaged young folk to take a break from caring.

The other thing that I want to do in the short term will require co-operation from partners including the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and it is to get rid of eligibility criteria, particularly some of the local eligibility criteria that have cropped up. That is of major importance to delivery.

As Ms Callaghan rightly points out, unpaid carers have seen a decline in their mental health during this time. The national wellbeing hub that I talked about earlier is also open to carers. Yesterday we talked with managers from carer centres and, although a lot of work is being done to signpost folk to the hub, we still need to do more on that front. The national wellbeing hub also has a dedicated section for unpaid carers, and we are developing a dedicated page for young carers.

Those are some of the short-term things that we have done, are doing and will do.