Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
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.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
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.
Search by MSP
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.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
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.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
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:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
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.
Criathragan Hide all filters
Displaying 1225 contributions
|
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
The petition is focused on one particular area, but we know that there is an issue at Dr Gray’s hospital and that plenty of other rural areas have the same issue. Paul Sweeney said that we cannot always have an expert in a small village. However, experts could travel to different areas where they are needed, which would make it easier for people to get the help that they need. I would like expand our wider inquiry into rural health so that we could have an evidence session on maternal health in rural areas.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
We heard from Dr Williams of the RCPG, who was on the previous panel, about the primary and secondary care interface. I think that that gap exists in all health services—it is not exclusive to Scotland; it is also in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Are you able to focus on and make contributions on that, or is it about finding the relevant person to pass concerns on to?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Petitions
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
I will make a wider point to start with before focusing on the petition itself. The dedication of our staff who work in remote and rural areas is without exception. They are extremely dedicated and work very hard. However, despite their hard work, I feel that our patients who live in remote and rural areas get a far worse service than those who live in urban communities. There are a number of reasons for that, and Emma Harper has mentioned a few of them, including travel and there not being the required expertise. We also know that there is a lack of staff in remote and rural areas in comparison with urban areas. That applies to nurses, doctors and GPs. Retention is also important in those areas.
I have done a GP shift in Dumfries and Galloway, so I know that travel is one of the issues. When I drove to my shift, the road was flooded. At one point, I genuinely thought that I was going to drown. Admittedly, there was a storm. Patients face travel issues day in, day out in rural areas. What we offer is not good enough.
I would advocate our looking into rural healthcare generally and having an inquiry that would incorporate a lot of what we have spoken about and a lot of what the petitions highlight.
On PE1845, I am not sure that an agency is the way forward. However, I think that the issues that it raises need to be part of our potential work on rural healthcare.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
I understand that you are not able to take on individual cases. However, I go back to the idea of a golden thread. If, for example, multiple people come to you from different parts of the country and present you with a similar issue, will you unfortunately miss that because you cannot investigate individual cases, or do you log the information to see whether there is a golden thread that you are able to pick up?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
The remit for the Scottish commissioner is already a bit bigger than yours. A lot of people have come to the committee and asked for other things to be included in that remit, so the role seems to be expanding. Do you feel that our current budget and resource will be enough, or do you feel that it will be okay for the initial phase, with an agile team, but that we would need scope for future expansion?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
My first question is very straightforward: do you feel that you have enough resources?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
Do you have enough resources to be able to expand as you want to?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
I have a couple of questions. The first goes back to the voices of staff, and is directed to Shaun Gallagher. Matthew McClelland spoke about whistleblowing legislation, but my understanding is that people who sit on health boards are not covered by that. Does that not create an issue, especially when we are talking about a blame culture? Should we take steps to include members of health boards in such legislation?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 21 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
It is reassuring to hear that you are all speaking—one would expect you to, of course, but it still reassuring.
I suppose that the question is about the investigation. You said that you had previously been in areas where a lot of investigation was done, and that takes a certain amount of skill, time and resource to do. I appreciate that you have been in post for only 100 days, but do you feel that your role is to find those themes and perhaps pass them on to the relevant organisation, or do you feel that your job is to move on to the ones that you want to investigate further?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Patient Safety Commissioner for Scotland Bill: Stage 1
Meeting date: 7 February 2023
Dr Sandesh Gulhane
Thank you for your answers. We would love to see that information, Simon.
I return to what Rosemary Agnew said. I know that I am veering outside of the resource theme, but this is important. If we set up an organisation that had the scope to expand, what would our measure of success be that would indicate that it needed to expand?
