Health and Sport Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Official Report 599KB pdf

University of St Andrews (Degrees in Medicine and Dentistry) Bill: Stage 2

The next item of business is stage 2 consideration of the University of St Andrews (Degrees in Medicine and Dentistry) Bill. I welcome the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport, Jeane Freeman, who is the minister in charge of the bill. No amendments have been lodged, so I invite the cabinet secretary to make a brief statement to put our formal consideration into context.

Thank you, convener, for the opportunity to make a brief statement on the bill. As colleagues are aware, this is a technical single-purpose bill. I will recap. The bill’s purpose is to repeal an archaic, unfair and, arguably, anticompetitive prohibition that prevents the University of St Andrews from awarding medicine and dentistry degrees. The prohibition was not intended to last for any significant length of time.

The bill has been introduced at this time to enable the University of St Andrews to award, jointly with the University of Dundee, primary medical qualification degrees to Scottish graduate entry medicine—ScotGEM—students in advance of the first cohort graduating in 2022.

I welcome and appreciate the Scottish Parliament’s unanimous support for the bill at stage 1 and for the committee’s scrutiny of the bill and its support for the ScotGEM programme as a whole, which is Scotland’s first graduate entry programme for medicine.

As no amendments have been lodged for consideration at stage 2, I have nothing further to add.

Thank you very much, cabinet secretary. The only requirement for the committee this morning is to consider and dispose of the three sections of the bill and the long title.

Sections 1 to 3 agreed to.

Long title agreed to.

That concludes our stage 2 consideration of the bill. I thank the cabinet secretary for attending the committee and members for their attention. No doubt we will have the stage 3 debate on the bill in the next wee while.