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At the moment, I am here every week, so I would be massively disappointed if you were to have me back only in a year’s time.

It is not just museums and galleries; you could add to that list our very significant built environment—I cannot call it housing stock, but you know what I am trying to say—for which Historic Environment Scotland has responsibility. A dimension of that very much feeds into the net zero side of things.

We are very conscious of that, and we need to understand it better. Indeed, we are engaged in doing so, but again it is all about asking the right questions, and we need to get the answers not just for the net zero side of things but for the cultural resource—if one wants to call it that—or opportunity that we could have in that respect. Of course, that brings us back to our earlier discussion about partnership working not just with national companies with regard to culture at a nationally funded level but with those at a local authority level, too.

I do not want to put words into Maurice Golden’s mouth, but I think that what we are talking about is trying to unlock as much of the existing resource allocation as we can. This is not a matter of reinventing the wheel; instead, it is about finding out how we get everything to work as well as we possibly can and identifying any gaps. However, the only way in which we will know whether there are any gaps is by getting the data back not just from health but from the culture side of things, and if there is a takeaway for me from this meeting, it is definitely to work out what the quality of that information is. I am happy to come back on this issue for Maurice Golden’s benefit, but if other committee colleagues are interested in finding out more, I am happy to share that information with them, too.

There is another part to the equation. It is one thing people being aware that this is a good thing to do, but there are other questions to consider. Where does one plug into the arts and cultural offering? Are all arts and cultural organisations aware that they can and should play a part? How do we get that partnership going and working at scale? The deputy convener highlighted that that is the challenge, as there will always be early adopters. The challenge is how we ensure that the provision is offered across the country, without there being geographical or social demographic variances. Ensuring that we match things up is work in progress.

You might imagine that, in advance of such a meeting, we would be well advised on the state of play in our departmental settings. I am happy to go into some detail with the committee about that, because it shows that things are happening, which is heartening. For example, if we consider the programmes that some of our national cultural companies are already involved in, that should give us great heart that a lot of work is on-going.

My question—I need to work with my colleague the health secretary on this—is how we can be satisfied that there is a transmission mechanism in the areas for which we are responsible. As Mr Yousaf outlined, when the support workers, the mental health professionals and the GPs who will prescribe such opportunities are all in place, we need to ensure that we have the transmission mechanism, for want of a better description, for how that should work. That is work in progress. We will have to ensure that the cogs or gears work in harmony.

I will try to be quick, but maybe this is an appropriate point to give some examples. You mentioned the Christie commission and how long ago it made recommendations. When looking at the concrete examples that I gave you a sneak preview of, I am struck that they have been operating for some time. The question is how we make them scalable.

To give some concrete examples, the committee will be aware of Big Noise, which is run by Sistema Scotland. It is a high-quality music education and social change programme that works intensively with kids, young people and families in specifically targeted communities and it has benefits that relate to the national performance framework—child-focused wellbeing outcomes such as increased resilience, happiness, sense of belonging, fulfilment and emotional wellbeing. This is a scalable programme. It is up and running. Do we recognise it for what it is? Yes, absolutely. Is there more that can be done with it? Yes, there is.

The Scottish Ballet dance health and wellbeing programme has been across Scotland since 2013, not just for the past few years. It has been up and running for a while and is considered a global leader in the field. Many referrals, particularly for those living with Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis, have already come from partner consultant neurologists at Ninewells hospital and medical school and the Queen Elizabeth university hospital. The programme has been going for some time. Is it scalable? Yes, it is.

The National Theatre of Scotland has just been running a two-year project addressing ageism, social isolation and transphobia, supporting the recreational, artistic and social rights of LGBT+ over-50s. Is that scalable? Yes, it is.

National Museums Scotland has tailored programmes for people with dementia, offering social experience connected to collections and reminiscing. I could go on, as there is more that National Museums Scotland has been doing, and theatre groups and the Scottish Book Trust have been doing things.

There are a wide range of things that are up and running and have been running for some time relating to the Christie commission recommendations. The challenge is how we build on the very good work that is currently happening to make sure that, as we scale up and have the wider awareness that these schemes are up and running, they can provide the capacity when GPs, as the deputy convener was alluding to, are adopting social prescribing across the piece. That will be the challenge—making people aware of schemes and then doing them at enough scale to satisfy the demand as the approach that we are trying to get between health and social care and culture and the arts becomes more mainstream.

We need to open things up, because we certainly do not have time to do this. There is also the question of what culture is in this context. We can establish a cultural and arts community and organisations and it is very observable what a local arts or cultural group might be doing in Argyll, as Jenni Minto has said. There are so many other things that we know from the research have an impact but might not be viewed as culture with a capital C, if that makes sense. Sorry, I do not want to open up a conceptual conversation, deputy convener, but I am very keen that we are able to capture that. An example is gardening and allotments. There is a whole series of things that would not necessarily be thought of as being culture with a capital C but which clearly impact on people’s wellbeing and are part of a continuum of what might be offered and supported.

It will be a future evidence session perhaps, deputy convener.

Forgive me, but I did not get to Mr Ruskell’s question about language skills and assisting people who might not have English as a second language. The Scottish Government has been identifying a number of colleagues who are speakers of Ukrainian and/or Russian. The Ukrainian community in Scotland is, as you might imagine, seized of doing absolutely everything and anything that it can do to help people who are arriving, which is why we are working so closely with them to mobilise as many resources as we possibly can.

I should perhaps clarify that what we are learning about the significant change in the UK Government’s approach is that it is not moving from a position of waiving visa requirements for entry into the UK to the same position as the European Union countries are taking. The system it is changing to is making it possible for people to apply online and to receive a reply to that request online. We do not yet know how long applications might take. We are still at the early stages of understanding how things might work. Given the constraints on human resources, I imagine it would be easier administratively to deal with any application online, compared to using a smaller number of outlying visa offices where there are now long queues.

Our preference is for the UK to emulate the approach of Ireland and other EU member states and waive visa requirements entirely. That is not, apparently, what it is planning to do. It is changing the system in a way that should make application and the processing of such applications a lot speedier, with the anticipation that that would allow a lot more refugees to arrive here much more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.

Yes. This relates in part to the community scheme that the UK Government has talked about under which individuals, organisations or companies might be able to sponsor applicants so that they might secure a visa. We have been talking with the Home Office about those areas, and this is a very good example of where we would want to impress on the Home Office that families should be able to be together.

My view is that we should take in everybody who needs to be taken in. If the UK Government is going to continue to use what are effectively administrative immigration systems to deal with a humanitarian crisis, we have to do our best to make sure that it has the fewest restrictions possible. What Fiona Hyslop raises is a particular by-product of the existing approach, and it is exactly the type of thing that we have been bringing up.

One of the problems that we have had in the Scottish Government—and this will be the same for our colleagues in Wales and Northern Ireland—is that when one seeks to speak with UK Government departments about the intended workings of schemes, nothing comes back on how they are intended to work. We have made major suggestions about what we would prefer, and I described to the committee earlier our approach involving local government at its heart. We say that to the Home Office and ask whether it agrees that it would be workable and advisable regardless of what one concludes is the best way of doing it elsewhere in the UK. We are very clear about what we want to do here. We think that it is the best way of delivering for people. In addition to that, it would appear that those specific administrative restrictions might still apply with after today’s update to visa applications that the UK Government is in the process of deciding and announcing, and we might still have to press to make sure that we do not see the circumstances that Ms Hyslop has raised.

I totally agree with Sarah Boyack. Such considerations need to be at the forefront of people’s minds. We will probably all have seen the same reports of the children with cancer who were unable to continue to receive medicine in Ukraine, who have now left and are receiving treatment in Poland. We can only imagine the challenge that it poses to the Polish health system to have to deal with a million refugees, including people with existing health conditions and other challenges.

That underlines why we all need to do our share so that the burden does not fall entirely on the immediately neighbouring countries. We have an excellent health service in Scotland, which is there for everybody at the point of need, and it will be there for Ukrainians who arrive here, too. They are entitled to free healthcare, as they should be, and the medicines that go with it.

Yes, in principle. I agree that there is a fine line in all of this. There are very principled Russians, often exiles, whether in the cultural sphere, journalism or political activism, who are opponents of the Putin regime, who have spoken out against the approach that the Russian Government has taken in pursuing its aims through violent means. As we know, this is not the first time that it has done that. It has done so in Georgia, twice; it has done so in Moldova; it has done so within its own borders, in Chechnya. This is not a new phenomenon. We have now got to the stage where the international community is saying, “We need everybody in Russia to understand that this cannot go on.” There is a general approach of divesting from Russia. There is a general approach of ending the participation of official Russian delegations, teams and so on.

At the heart of what you asked is an appreciation of the nuances of a situation in which the honorary president of the Edinburgh International Festival, who has not spoken out against the Putin regime, has been asked to give up his position—and quite rightly so—and a conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has taken a principled position in condemnation of the Russian Government. There is and must be nuance in the approach that we are taking to Russia, which recognises that there are a great many people who should be applauded for their principled stand, whether those in exile—who might be here—or the thousands of people who have been protesting on the streets of Russia itself. We need to make sure that, while taking a very strong and principled stand that is aimed at having a significant impact on Russian public opinion and the Russian regime, our approach is nuanced enough to encompass those Russians who are opponents of the regime. I am sure that nobody would wish an unintended consequence to be that we cause them difficulties.