Chamber and committees

Sometimes all these budget lines, top lines and different figures just get thrown out there. I am interested in the idea of £15 per hour for care persons. That is what a band 5, three-year university-trained staff nurse makes. If we were going to make a challenge to move or increase that spend, that puts another burden on workforce planning, and that would be a concern for me. I am suggesting that social care staff should be supported and educated to have clinical expertise and progression, but £1.6 billion is an interesting figure that you have given us—if such a measure were to be taken—for a £15 per hour salary. It would be interesting to hear your additional comments on that.

Good morning, Dr Phin. I am interested in information sharing. Given that we now have different scientific advisory groups in each Administration, many of the members of which will, I am sure, know each other, we probably want to pursue a collaborative process using non-legislative measures rather than legislative approaches, which is part of the memorandum of understanding. I am interested in how good information sharing is between the four nations. You have said that there are three representatives from Scotland but 15 from England in the group, and only one from Wales and two from Northern Ireland. How is information currently shared if there is a top-heavy input from England compared with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

I had one more question, about progress towards increasing primary care spend by 25 per cent—I think that the Government has a commitment to increase primary care spend by 25 per cent. I make that my final question.

At previous meetings, the committee has taken evidence on shifting the balance of care and moving spend to be more preventative, moving the focus away from hospital settings and more towards the community. The Scottish Government has committed to shifting the balance of care so that at least 50 per cent of front-line health spending takes place in community health services. That commitment is in the budget. Do we now need to be more ambitious, or is 50 per cent adequate for what we are planning?

I am pleased to be asking about sport and active living. We know that, during the first lockdown, people getting out for their daily mile or a walk was really important, including for their mental health. There is a proposal in the budget that investment in sport and active living will double to £100 million by the end of the parliamentary session, which is really good news. How will the additional funding for sport and active living be prioritised?

I have a quick question about social prescribing. In the previous session, the Health and Sport Committee produced a report on the benefits of social prescribing and said that it is an investment, not a cost. Social prescribing is good for physical and mental health. What needs to be done, or is being done, to demonstrate that social prescribing is really good? How will that work provide evidence that social prescribing could benefit from further investment?

My supplementary is similar to Sue Webber’s question about the “Hands, face, space” guidance. We have test and protect in Scotland, while England has had track and trace or test, trace and isolate. What collaborative work will be done on finding out whether TTI, test and protect or whatever worked, and on people’s understanding of and adherence to the guidance? It is important that what is contained in messaging is achievable in order to contain pandemics, so I am interested to hear whether there will be any collaboration on behavioural aspects with regard to such important messages.

Yes.

I congratulate Sarah Boyack on securing the debate. Ms Boyack has rightly outlined the issue of vaccine monopolies. I remind members that I am a nurse and I am part of NHS Dumfries and Galloway’s vaccine team. I have not done many booster shifts recently, but I have one scheduled on 30 December.

I support the calls from charities for the Prime Minister to waive intellectual property rules and to insist that vaccine technology is shared with the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 technology access pool.

As Action Aid points out, more than 200 million people have contracted Covid-19 infection during the pandemic, more than 4.5 million people have died and at least nine new billionaires have been minted because of Covid. That must change. Instead of creating vaccine billionaires, we must vaccinate the billions of people across the globe. Access to vaccines is not solely about ethics or fairness; it is also about reducing and limiting the reach and spread of a global and deadly virus.

Ensuring global access to Covid-19 vaccinations is in everyone’s interest. It will have many knock-on advantages for societies, economies, businesses and supply chains across the whole globe. At the end of September, the United Nations chief, António Guterres, spoke to world leaders on the disgraceful state of vaccine inequality, calling it

“a moral indictment of the state of our world. It is an obscenity.”

In response to the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccines have been produced. Although the proportion of the population needed to safely achieve global immunity to Covid-19 is uncertain, the World Health Organization has highlighted that herd immunity against measles and polio required 80 to 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated.

That means that to be more effective the use of vaccines will likely need to be more widespread, globally. However, vaccine availability currently differs vastly from country to country. Work by the Our World in Data project, associated with the University of Oxford, has shown the differences in availability of vaccines. Using data from Governments and health ministries around the world, the project provides daily updates on global vaccination levels.

On 23 August 2021, it reported that 32.5 per cent of the world population had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine and 24.5 per cent had received two vaccine doses. However, only 1.4 per cent of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. Many of those low-income countries could be considered part of the global south and 1.4 per cent is an incredibly low number.

In April 2020, a global initiative called COVAX was set up to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vaccines between countries, regardless of their income level. Jointly directed by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance and the World Health Organization, the initiative pools global funding to invest in research, manufacture, purchase, and distribution of vaccines.

However, most high-income countries, including the UK, have made direct deals with manufacturers. That has led to high-income countries dominating the purchasing and administration of vaccines. As a consequence, vast regions of the world experiencing a rapid rise in COVID cases and deaths are unable to access vaccines, which are our primary route out of the pandemic.

One figure that I quoted was that it costs $1.08 to produce a vaccine dose, but that vaccine is being sold to countries in the global south for $9.72 per dose. Does the member think that that should be addressed?