Chamber and committees

In areas in Covid protection levels 0 to 3, day centres and residential respite services can operate in line with the relevant guidance. I know that that is not happening as quickly in some areas as it is in others. In the past week, I have written to local authorities and health and social care partnerships to try to get things moving. I assure Mr O’Kane that I will continue to do my level best to ensure that there is day respite for carers.

We are also working with carers organisations and others on our forthcoming £1.4 million holiday voucher scheme, which will benefit carers, people with disabilities and families on low incomes. I am more than happy to discuss the issue further with Mr O’Kane because, like him and many other members, I know that we need to get back to some normality and allow folk to get the breaks that many so desperately need.

As Ms Gallacher and other members in the chamber know, I am very new to this post. At this moment in time, I am looking at all aspects of our mental health delivery, with a particular focus on young people. I have already spoken to health boards on the issue, including NHS Grampian and NHS Lothian, and I will continue to engage with boards, other partners and stakeholders to ensure that we get this right for children and young people in Scotland.

I welcome you to your new role, Deputy Presiding Officer. I am sure that you will be fantastic in it.

I thank everyone for their valuable and often personal contributions, which have made this extremely important debate even better. I pay tribute to Audrey Nicoll, Emma Roddick, Carol Mochan, Elena Whitham, Paul O’Kane and Craig Hoy for their first speeches. I apologise to the old hands, but I am going to concentrate mainly on their contributions and all the aspects of my portfolio in my closing remarks.

We have ambitious plans on mental wellbeing and social care as a core. Improving quality across both offers will be a vital part of our recovery. The health and wellbeing of individuals and communities at this time is an absolute priority, as many members have mentioned. Recovery in the social care sector will be achieved only if we learn the lessons from the pandemic. We must recognise the challenging position that many employers and workers now face, and we must seek to improve the offer, the services and the outcomes to give all recipients the best opportunity to thrive in the future.

In this afternoon’s debate, many folk have talked about lived experience and their personal experiences. We should not be afraid to talk about our personal experiences in this place, nor should we be afraid to listen to folk with lived experience as we formulate the policy for the future, and I fully intend to ensure that we engage everyone we can in formulating the mental health and social care policies that we need to formulate. That is the only way in which we will improve the offer.

Over the past year, there has been significant media focus on mental wellbeing, and it is important that we recognise that, as we move forward, there will be a broad range of areas where mental health and wellbeing in itself might have an impact on our recovery if we do not get things absolutely right.

As Mr Yousaf explained, we are committed to the creation of a national care service, which will be backed by a 25 per cent increase in investment in social care over the parliamentary session. We will build a world-leading social care system that will be based on fairness, equality and human rights, and it will provide us with the consistency, equity and fairness, as well as the national approach and accountabilities, that we need to improve social care in Scotland.

In the first 100 days of our Administration, we will begin consultation on the legislation that will be required to formulate the national care service, and I want as many folk as possible to respond to that consultation. I want members of the Scottish Parliament to be evangelists to get folk to respond to the consultation so that as many people as possible have their say. The aim is to introduce a bill in Parliament in the first year of the session. That will not be easy and we will need to think radically. That work will be supported by the social covenant steering group, which will include people with lived experience of using care services. The national care service will be operational within the five-year lifetime of this Parliament, but we have a lot of work to do.

Ms Duncan-Glancy makes a very good point. She will recognise that the issue was one of the matters that were on my desk when I first took office. We are doing everything possible to make sure that those payments reach people who should have had them as soon as possible. I have already written to local authorities and health and social care partnerships on the issue, and we will do all that we can to make sure that that £500 gets in the pooches and purses of those workers as soon as possible. I am sure that Ms Duncan-Glancy will continue to ask me about that.

There are a number of other issues that have not been brought up a great deal during the debate but which I must address, because they are areas on which members of the public have contacted me and other members. One such issue is that of care home visiting. It is my priority to meet representatives from across the sector to support further progress and improve the quality of visits. I have also today written to the Care Inspectorate to ensure that care homes are following the guidance that we have put in place. We are committed to strengthening residents’ rights in adult residential settings, including working quickly to give effect to Anne’s law, whereby residents can access their nominated relatives or friends to support their wellbeing.

Delayed discharge has also featured sparingly today. I am well aware of the human cost of delayed discharge and the benefits of ensuring that we address it properly. I will work with all health and social care partners to ensure that it is addressed safely and lawfully, and I have already written to them to that effect.

Dental services have improved dramatically in the past number of years. In my area of the north-east of Scotland, folk were queuing for miles to get on to the books of an NHS dentist. That is not the case any more, because we invested in a dental school in the north-east. In our manifesto, the SNP has committed to removing dental charges to ensure equity in treating dental patients. I can provide Mr Whitfield with a greater response, but we have made a huge advance there.

Mental health is an absolute priority for the Government, and it has been throughout the pandemic. Our mental health transition and recovery plan, which contains more than 100 actions, outlines our response to the mental health effects of Covid-19. We are particularly focused on providing the right support to anyone whose mental health has been disproportionately affected during the past 15 months. That plan is supported by a £120 million recovery and renewal fund to transform services. That is the single biggest investment in mental health in the history of the Parliament.

Today’s statistics show that more folk are working in our NHS than ever before—9,000 more. We also have 80 per cent more folk working in child and adolescent mental health services than was the case when we came into power in 2007. However, there is a way to go. We have also agreed early priorities for the investment that I have talked about and we have allocated more than £34 million for the delivery of transformational improvements to CAMHS and to clear waiting list backlogs for CAMHS and psychological therapies.

We have all seen the quarterly statistics that were published this morning, and I have to say that some board areas are performing much better than others. I want to ensure the export of best practice so that we can make the improvements that we need to make in CAMHS. I have already started to engage with board chief executives at each end of the performance spectrum, and I will continue to do so across all boards. It is vital that we get this right for our young people.

I thank everyone for taking part in the debate. The pandemic is far from over and there is much to be done to support the recovery of the mental health and social care sectors. Our recovery plans must be robust, and they must keep people at their centre—the people who work in the social care and mental health sectors, and the people in the community who require their services. As we move forward, we need to continue to listen—I am a great believer in ensuring that those who have lived experience can help to formulate policy—and, as the Minister for Mental Wellbeing and Social Care, I am committed, along with my ministerial colleagues, to doing just that.

We welcome the Mental Welfare Commission’s report, and we expect its recommendations to be addressed in full. Any decisions with respect to adults lacking capacity that are made by health and social care professionals in consultation with the individuals or their families and representatives, and independently of Government, should put those individuals’ rights, will and preference first and foremost. The Scottish Government is working with health and social care partnerships to improve the process so that frail older people do not have to spend any longer than necessary in hospital, while ensuring that discharges are lawful. We will also continue to engage with health and social care partnerships to share good practice. Today, I shall write to health board and local authority chief executives and to health and social care partnership chief officers about the report.

The matter has been investigated by the Mental Welfare Commission. We will take on board all the recommendations that the commission has made, 10 of which are for health and social care partnerships, with one for the Government, on monitoring. We will ensure that that monitoring takes place.

I discussed the issue this morning, at a meeting with the director of mental health and social care, which was my first meeting in my new ministerial role. I intend to write to all HSCPs to ensure that such transfers do not happen again. I point out to members that the transfers took place at a point when we were seeing horrific pictures from Italy of the coronavirus going rampant. At the time, clinicians believed that the best possible outcome for patients was their being moved out of hospital settings, and that should have been done following legal process. We will look at all of that and ensure that it does not happen again. If Ms Webber wants to talk about the issue in more detail, I will be more than happy to do that.

I reiterate the point that, during the course of the pandemic, the Government’s priority was to save lives. As has been said previously in the chamber by many of my ministerial colleagues, we were, in some regards, facing the unknown and, as has been said, we made some mistakes.

The Scottish Government has always made it clear that we will have a public inquiry into all those matters. That will happen, and all that has gone before us will be looked at and lessons will be learned. However, members must understand the particular challenges that we faced in the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic, when clinicians gave their advice and we followed it.

As I said in my earlier answer, the matter has been looked at by the Mental Welfare Commission. Throughout the pandemic period, the Government has followed the advice that we have received from the medical and scientific experts. Ms Baillie might shake her head, but that is the reality.

There are a number of things that we need to look at over time in order to learn lessons from a situation that was new to us all. The Government has said, time and time again, that we will have an inquiry, when all such matters will be looked into, and the Government will, of course, consider all recommendations that come out of that inquiry.

As Mr Cole-Hamilton is aware, the Government has said that it will put human rights at the heart of new legislation. When we do so, I hope that he will support us if any challenges are made by the United Kingdom Government to our responsibilities in that regard, which has happened most recently in our attempts to embed children’s rights in law here.