Chamber and committees

The minister knows that the Liberal Democrats want her to succeed on this issue and, to that end, she has our good wishes.

In the statement, it is encouraging to see a direction of travel towards rehab, but the services need to be sustainable even when occupancy drifts below 50 per cent. Before people can access rehab, they need to be stabilised first. The minister and I have discussed many times the need to address the gap in stabilisation services. That issue did not feature in today’s statement, so will she update members on where we are on stabilisation?

I am grateful for the intervention, but MBUs are not in the places where they are required and the peripatetic services that could offer the service are not on the ground. That means that mothers and their babies are forced far from home and from their networks of support just when they are most in need of support.

The Government might point out that MBUs need to support only 150 women a year, but it is vital to note that, every year, within 12 months of childbirth, 125 women receive treatment at an inpatient mental health unit, where they are separated from their babies.

The Government might also say, as the minister said earlier this month, that it is aware of barriers that are associated with receiving treatment far away from home, hence the existence of the mother and baby unit family fund. However, families need more than that. Women need access to treatment much closer to home. As the Royal College of Psychiatrists has said, they do not want a postcode lottery when it comes to perinatal health services.

Sadly, it is not only new and expectant mothers who have to travel far from home. Many of our children and young people have or are waiting for referrals to child and adolescent mental health services. I am sure that I am not the only MSP who has had, in increasing volumes, families getting in touch to share their experience of the system.

I really do not have time.

However, due to lack of space, many of those young people went to adult units.

We live in a time of increasing awareness about the mental health of our young people, yet we still fail to provide the right support for them. Some of them might be forced to travel hundreds of miles from their communities and families, just when they are most in need of stability and support. I find it appalling that this Government has allowed the situation to get to this stage. It simply must do better for our children and young people.

No one in the chamber or across the country doubts for a moment the vital work that our NHS does. That said, many people will not have access to that vital support in their communities, which must be rectified once and for all. This Government talks a good game when it comes to the health and social care of Scotland, but warm words and platitudes mean nothing to patients and staff who are having to suffer at the business end. It is time for the Government to act in their interests.

I am afraid that I do not have time.

Many of the young people who need support will have access to community services that provide help close to home. However, sometimes, more specialist treatment is required and, in such cases, options are beginning to become severely limited. There are only three inpatient units dedicated to the mental health of children and young people, and none of them is north of Dundee. In 2018-19, there were 118 admissions involving 101 young people under the age of 18 who desperately needed mental health support.

I am pleased to rise on behalf of my party in this important debate.

It will come as no surprise to members to hear me say that, as a Liberal Democrat, I will always champion services being kept as local as possible to the people whom they support. That is one of the principal reasons for my party’s being against the creation of a national care service. Centralising services to ministers is not the answer to the on-going crisis in social care. It would take good local services and bring them under Scottish Government control, which would take power away from the providers who—let us be honest—know far more about what patients and staff require than the Government does. We have only to look at the scandal of sending untested and even Covid-positive patients into Scotland’s care homes at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic to know that the Scottish Government should be nowhere near the issue.

However, it is not just the plans to create a national care service that highlight the fact that the Government does not want to keep care close to home, no matter what the motion may state. In Caithness, many expectant mothers now need to travel more than 100 miles down the A9 to Inverness to give birth. That journey takes more than two hours and there are on-going fears about unexpected complications for mothers and their babies. Women face being stranded too far from home or a hospital to give birth safely.

Compare that with the situation right here in Edinburgh. An expectant mother in my constituency—in Cramond, say—would need to travel for only half an hour to get to the maternity unit at the Royal infirmary of Edinburgh. Given the work that the Government has rightly undertaken to resolve issues with the Moray maternity service, you might think that it would strive to do something similar for Caithness—but, Presiding Officer, you would be wrong.

My colleague in Westminster Jamie Stone has been raising the issue since he was elected in 2017. He has repeatedly asked the Scottish Government to undertake a safety audit, and even got to the point of inviting the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care himself to make the journey from Wick to Raigmore that many women are forced to endure every day.

The cabinet secretary has, it seems, so far refused to do so. He has not explained what meaningful action he is taking instead, which is simply not good enough. Every expectant mother in the country should be able easily to access maternity services close to home. They deserve access to the support that they need as they go through a major chapter in their lives. That should go without saying.

Earlier this month, my colleague Beatrice Wishart raised the fact that, north of Livingston, there are no dedicated inpatient mental healthcare beds in mother and baby units for new mothers to receive care alongside their babies. That means that mothers in places such as Lerwick, Stornoway, Ullapool, Dundee, Hawick and Stranraer could travel for miles to get the care that they need.

I am grateful to the cabinet secretary for giving way, and for taking time, in his remarks, to talk about young people and children who suffer with long Covid. Can he quantify the situation for members? How many children in Scotland currently have long Covid? That statistic is quite hard to come by.

We know that we can prevent long Covid in children by preventing them from catching coronavirus in the first place by installing high-efficiency particulate air—HEPA—filters in Scotland’s classrooms. Can he address that point and say whether his Government plans to do just that?

Will the minister give way?

Three weeks ago, the Liberal Democrats got our business day. We get roughly one a year, so it is actually quite a celestial alignment for us. Had we not had sight of the Government’s intentions, there is no doubt in my mind that we would have used that very precious single day to debate long Covid. However, because the SNP Government had indicated that it would finally use Government time for a debate on long Covid on the following day, we decided to focus on other things.

After our business was submitted and the parliamentary agenda was set, the Government pulled its debate. That was a craven example of the Government once again dodging scrutiny on an exposed flank, because it occurred to the Government that it literally had nothing to say. Three weeks on, not much has changed; long Covid is an exposed flank.

There was much hope attached to that aborted debate, as there was to the debate today, but it has been thin gruel. Jackie Baillie was right to flush out the pretence that the Government was attaching to the £3 million, talking as though it was some kind of new money when it is in fact a rebadge of the first iteration.

The cabinet secretary tried to strike a conciliatory tone, but in reality he, like many Government party members, just provided a précis, a list and a summary of the problems as we find them, and they were very thin on solutions. That was rightly and succinctly identified by Dr Gulhane.

I am grateful that Dr Gulhane and the cabinet secretary, in their intervention exchange during Dr Gulhane’s speech, set out that future long Covid sufferers who do not have a positive Covid test result in their medical records will not face the same battle for belief and support as sufferers in the first wave did, and in some cases still do. I will remind the Government of that commitment.

We heard a lot of personal stories. Several came from Jackie Baillie’s excellent speech. She was right to identify the cynical choreography of a Government rushing out letters to sufferers on the very day of this debate. I associate myself with Jackie Baillie’s remarks about employment and offer my support to Mark Griffin with his forthcoming member’s bill on making long Covid an industrial injury.

Sufferers need action; we need action, but there is not much encouragement for sufferers in the words of Government members. I have a lot of respect for Evelyn Tweed, but to suggest that funding the creation of long Covid clinics somehow robs Peter to pay Paul and deprives the health service of funds elsewhere betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the scale of this public health disaster.

The minister did a good job of reiterating the point that was made by Emma Harper, but if Emma Harper took my intervention, I would have pointed to the long Covid sufferers in the gallery who will show her the truth to that lie. They were all shaking their heads in disagreement at the misapprehension that the Government is creating that these services are somehow already out there if you half close your eyes and know where to look—that is laughable. This is a public health disaster and its impact will be felt across our schools, economic activity and workforce.

I also found the cabinet secretary’s intervention on Brian Whittle astonishing. He sought to reiterate the point that the minister just made. They continually attempt to hinge their opposition to long Covid clinics—clinics that the long Covid community is crying out for. One suggested that focused, holistic, multidisciplinary support obtained in a one-stop stop will actually hinder their health outcomes; that is enraging.

That is the problem. The SNP’s back benchers have clearly overheated the long Covid Wikipedia page in preparation for this debate, but it is hard to imagine that many of them have actually spent time with sufferers or the groups that support them.

Will the minister accept an intervention?