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I well recognise the issues that Mr Carson raises. I engaged on them with his constituents when I was at the Dumfries and Galloway board annual review last year and when I met trade union colleagues in his area. I have also had meetings with him to discuss those matters.

The thread that runs through all that he has set out is patient safety. We rely on clinicians to advise us on ensuring that services remain safe. I recognise that a balance always needs to be struck between needing to travel and ensuring safe and timely access to services.

As I said, I am from an island community, so I recognise the need to travel for services and what that means, and the burden that it can have on individuals and their families. We want to make sure that such decisions are always taken in a proportionate manner that reflects the needs of those communities.

I recognise Emma Harper’s long-standing interest in this area and the work that she has done, as well as the work of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, which she sits on, to advance things in that area.

The regulations later this year will provide the full details, but at the centre of those regulations, we will set out where products can be located, how they can be promoted and to whom. As I said to Carol Mochan, we will also be aligning ourselves with the regulations that are in place in England and Wales, to ensure that there is consistency across these isles for those who are selling such products.

I recognise, as I did in my answer to Annie Wells, the fact that we have delivery agents with whom we need to work to make sure that decisions that are taken locally reflect the national policy direction that is set out in the documents. I also recognise that we need to continue to support local areas, as we are doing—our local authority partners received a record funding settlement, as did our health boards, this year; those are the funders of our health and social care partnerships.

I recognise that decisions are to be taken locally, but, in some of the areas that Patrick Harvie set out, they are not in keeping with what I have set out in relation to the population health or service renewal frameworks, or directed towards preventative areas of spending. That is why I will continue to work with local decision makers, as we have done in the development of the product through COSLA, to ensure that the importance of prevention is recognised.

Audrey Nicoll is absolutely right that general practice will play an ever more important role in the delivery of our services. For us to shift the balance of care and for our constituents to receive services within the community that they call home, we will be required to support general practice to play that role in a sustainable way.

A further £10.5 million has been invested this year to expand targeted interventions by GP practices on cardiovascular disease and frailty prevention. As part of that investment, we have already agreed an enhanced service with the British Medical Association that will increase the number of proactive interventions to prevent cardiovascular disease from having a significant impact on patients’ long-term health outlook.

By spring next year, we will offer a frailty enhanced service to general practices, enabling each GP practice to identify a frailty lead, which will help to drive improvements in frailty care through training, data optimisation and cross-sector collaboration.

I thank Brian Whittle for what I think was his support for what we have set out in the documents. I recognise that there has to be a continued emphasis on prevention. With regard to what Ms Robison set out when she was in my role, significant steps have been made to move to a more preventative model, including the work that has been done on urgent care pathways and the hospital at home service, for example.

However, the statement is an acknowledgement that we need to do more. We need to go further and we need to go faster. On delivery, both of the documents set out the progress that we wish to make over the coming years, and I expect to see some elements of them delivered quickly. Some changes will be happening now, such as those that I announced in relation to foods that are high in fat, salt and sugar, and our proposed structural changes to some of our national boards.

On Brian Whittle’s question about the digital front door, he is correct. The initial pilot is happening in Lanarkshire at the end of this year and we expect to roll it out to the rest of Scotland in 2026.

Improving access to urgent care services is a key priority for the Scottish Government. On 31 March 2025, we published the NHS Scotland operational improvement plan, which sets out how we plan to improve access to treatment, including in urgent care settings. As part of our wider £21.7 billion investment in health and social care services, the plan includes an additional £200 million to reduce waiting times and improve patient flow through hospitals, which will lead to a reduction in ambulance turnaround times and in delayed discharges. We are supporting boards to strengthen facilities such as flow navigation centres, so that they are able to refer patients to more services and avoid their unnecessary conveyance to hospital in ambulances.

I have already referenced a significant amount of intervention. The operational improvement plan, which was published earlier this year, will address some of the concerns that Mr Rennie is highlighting. It will increase the capacity of hospital at home and social care services, and it will ensure that we have call-before-you-convey services for our ambulance service. It will make sure that we have a whole-system response that looks after the individual patient, as opposed to the other way around.

There is already significant investment going on, and, in relation to oversight, we now have a national social care advisory board, which is ensuring that we respond to the needs of the social care system, because it is integral to the performance of our health service.

The member is absolutely right that the variance in delayed discharge performance among our health and social care partnerships is far too wide. The First Minister has said that on countless occasions, as have I. That is why the new Minister for Social Care and Mental Wellbeing and I have a regular meeting with the health and social care partnerships, so that we can ensure that best practice is learned across the system.

We are working with our health boards to improve the clinical pathways to ensure that patients who can be moved through the system quickly are discharged quickly. We do not see the picture that the member paints of delayed discharge being endemic across all parts of the system, because there is good performance in some parts of it. I want to learn from those best-performing areas to ensure that we can take that best practice to the areas that are most challenged. We are providing financial and practical support in order to do just that.

On the ambulance turnaround times that we are seeing, the investments that we are making in relation to all the aspects that Jackie Baillie speaks to are having an impact, including a substantial reduction in delayed discharge from the 2,000 figure that she quotes—delayed discharge was at its peak around Christmas time, but it is below that position now.

Of course, we must support our general practitioners and we must support our wider system. That is the very point that I was making when I said that we need to support our ambulance service to respond. The performance of our ambulance service is robust in terms of the response times of ambulance service colleagues. The median purple incident response time is at 6 minutes 45 seconds, and we are seeing an improvement in that picture.

I will do everything that I can to make sure that the whole system responds to lessen the pressure on our ambulance service, for exactly the reasons that Jackie Baillie sets out.

I recognise the issue that Annie Wells has posed and the seriousness with which the proposed closure will be regarded by the community in Glasgow that receives support with Huntington’s disease. We are working on the two documents in collaboration with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, in recognition of the fact that, in many ways, local authorities are our delivery agents in such settings, along with our health and social care partnerships.

We have invested in an increased level of support for our local authority partners, which should also mean an increased level of support for our health and social care partnerships, but I recognise that, at the moment, people still need to make difficult decisions.

The two documents set out the frameworks for how we can shift the balance of care and how we can shift where resource goes to support those more interventionist actions and early intervention priorities, such as the one that Annie Wells sets out. If she wants to write to me with the details, I will be more than happy to see what can be done in the short term.