The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
There are two types of keyword search:
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 674 contributions
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 21 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
For context, I point out that it was just in the past 24 hours that the psychological therapy staff member to whom I referred was in touch about staff having to work unpaid hours because they are so concerned about patients.
I am slightly concerned about what we will do until the new staff who have been recruited are actually in post, given the lag that often comes with recruitment. I think that your submission mentioned 12 weeks, in that regard.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 21 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
According to the submissions, all the boards that are represented have been escalated to higher levels of the framework, and they all have higher turnover than the national average. Is the high level of turnover linked to poor culture in your board areas?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 21 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
Everyone else will talk about buildings and things like that, but I want to talk about the social infrastructure that we need for people to be able to have time to be active. That relates to Kate Joester’s point that, if a person is trying to drop kids off at school, do the shopping and come back, when will they actually have time to take a meaningful walk, go for a cycle or participate in a class in a local authority setting.
Not everybody might have an answer from their working experience, but I wonder whether anyone can reflect on what changes we need to make. For example, the Green Party is a big advocate of the four-day working week, which would allow people more time to focus on things that are important to them. We also need to look at caring time. Does anyone have thoughts on the social infrastructure that we need to facilitate women and girls having time to take care of themselves?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 21 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
I will be first every time to stand up and say that those are good careers and that that is not the reality in every single department in every single hospital. However, I think that when staff are telling us about the conditions we must address them and ensure that workplaces are supportive for absolutely everyone.
For my supplementary, I want to go back to Cathie Cowan, given that NHS Forth Valley was escalated on the basis of its culture. I spoke to a number of staff members before escalation; they all told me that senior management were remote from the workforce and were rarely seen. When five respiratory consultants resigned, they all cited the toxic culture as a reason. Since the escalation, psychological therapy staff have been in touch and have said that because of the two-year waits they are so worried about patients that they are working unpaid hours. What is being done to acknowledge the culture that staff have been working under, and how will the situation be sorted? We seem to be talking about three or four departments in NHS Forth Valley alone.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 21 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
My question on this theme has been adequately covered so, in the interest of time, you can move on, convener.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
You mentioned changing facilities. What else do you think could be done to improve facilities? Some activities in Falkirk, for example, take place in the high schools after the school day has finished, so the lights are often off in the rest of the school, and it is quite an oppressive environment to walk into when it is mostly in the dark. Are there any other examples of ways that we could make the buildings better for women to participate?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
To what extent are you sympathetic to extending the PSC’s remit to include acting as the voice of staff? Do you agree that widening the remit could enable the PSC to get a clearer picture of patient safety concerns, given the different ways in which such concerns are raised, or do you think that it would risk adding duplication or potentially streamlining the remit across all those different ways?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
Paul Sweeney was just talking about exercise being seen as a punishment and how, with influencers and so on, we do not want that to become a thing for young women and teenage girls. However, there is still the older cohort of young women for whom, in the early noughties and so on, that was the reality of physical exercise and activity. Many of us shied away from exercise and organised team sport for those punishment-related reasons. Many of those women will now feel that they should know what physical activity and sport they enjoy doing.
How can we reverse that damage and give that age group opportunities—without stigma—to come back to physical activity and take up new things of the sort that they shied away from when they were younger?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
Given that, as you have just mentioned, minister, the remit is slightly wider than that of the Patient Safety Commissioner for England, do you have any concerns about duplications on the medicine side of things and between the roles of the two commissioners? Do you think that the role for the new commissioner for Scotland is realistic, given its breadth and potential workload?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 14 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
A part of the inquiry that I am interested in is how we build a movement toward sport for life, which is probably difficult to do for the age group that you were looking at. How can we better facilitate changes in activities that naturally happen during people’s lives—such as switching from one sport to another? Can we focus, in particular, on where following pathways into elite sport comes in for those young people in late primary school and early secondary school? Also, how do we ensure that they have the skills to be able to go out for a run or go to the gym, which are the physical activities that most people do weekly?