He explained that, although Scotland has approximately 10% of the UK population and might have been expected to recruit 10% of the patients into UK wide clinical research, outside Covid, Scottish sites were contributing less than 1%. • He expressed IQVIA’s disappointment that there appeared to have been little action taken on a White Paper submitted by IQVIA to the Scottish Government in 2020 making recommendations on how Scottish clinical research could benefit from some of the positive process changes in Clinical Research and data usage, made in response to the COVID pandemic. • The organisation had advised that there would be significant benefit to a single delivery plan for a unified Scottish research policy, a key element of which would be that individual NHS hospitals should be able to benefit directly from the investment into trials they were running to allow reinvestment in supporting further research, instead of funds going back into a central pot. • On the key issue of data, he said the future for Scotland lay in connecting data and analytics – instead of safe havens within each of the regions, creating a single and unified national NHS Scottish dataset. • The recommendations also included supporting GPs to direct people to clinical trials – and helping patients self-referring through websites such as clinicaltrials.org. • Mr White said that he hoped the decision to withdraw Prime Site status could be a catalyst for Government, NHS and the wider sector to now move ahead and make the changes needed to realise Scotland’s status including some of the recommendations industry have submitted to government. • During the discussion that followed Mr White agreed to an invitation for further discussions from The Data Lab and Andrew Fowlie at SHIP.