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I appreciate that. Most MSPs will be getting correspondence from people about the boosters. I saw a couple of pieces of correspondence yesterday. One was from a person who had gone to the website where they saw that they had an appointment in a couple of days. However, they were still waiting for a letter, so there seems to be a problem there.

I also note that boosters for over-80s in Cowdenbeath and Lochgelly are not due until November at general practices, but people who are in their 70s will be getting their boosters before that, even though the over-80s are more at risk.

Is there a specific minister or email address to which MSPs can channel such issues? We seem to have to go round the houses. If we go to ministers, we do not get a response for weeks or sometimes months. If we try to go through our NHS board, we are sent to a website. The situation is a real worry for people in their 80s and 70s, so is there something that we can do to ensure that people who have concerns have somewhere to take them where they will get a response?

Thank you. Everybody understands that the NHS is under immense pressure. Staff are, frankly, under too much pressure. Something will have to give at some point, if we do not get a hold of things. You can understand the worry for people in their 70s and 80s.

I will pick up on death rates. It was said this week that the number of deaths registered in Scotland from all causes was 24 per cent more than the five-year average. I know from people who have contacted me after having struggled to get a GP appointment or to see anybody in a medical centre that they have eventually presented themselves at the hospital, where they have found out that they have cancer or something, and that it has moved on by some stages. Are you aware of that? To what extent is it an issue? Are you monitoring it? Are excess deaths a result of community and other parts of our NHS being shut down? Where are we in relation to general practices giving people appointments when they say that they need an appointment because they feel ill?

How are the booster jags going? [Laughter.]

I know that we need to move on, but that is not the experience of people out there in communities. People who are feeling ill are finding it difficult to get face-to-face appointments.

I have raised social care issues with the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister over the past few weeks. We might need to have a much more focused task force, because I am not sure that the capacity to deliver exists within the current management set-ups of the health and social care partnerships. However, that is for another day.

Do you accept that, this winter, more people will die of cancer and other health harms that could have been prevented and that that will be a knock-on effect of Covid? How do you balance the focus on Covid with a focus on other harms in the community?

I note the statement that you made with, I think, Andrew Buist about general practitioners. I know of constituents who were unable to get a GP appointment and, through another route, ended up severely ill at hospital. There are real harms out there. I acknowledge that, before Covid, a massive amount of good work was going on in health centres to triage people—I am not suggesting that we suddenly go back to everyone getting a face-to-face appointment—but there has to be a guarantee for people who feel so ill that they need such an appointment. How will our NHS cope with that? After all, the threat of death now comes not so much from Covid but from the knock-on effect on all the other health ills that have not been dealt with because of the focus on Covid.

Could the committee get an update, and could we have a progress report on the steps that are being taken to make schools safer for kids?

The First Minister said that it might well recommend keeping the mitigations in place for longer but that the group would consider them that afternoon. A lot of parents write to us about those issues.

I will pick up on a couple of things. In the past few weeks, I have met staff and trade union representatives from the front line in our NHS. They would argue that, although the announcement that was made yesterday was welcome, it should have been made earlier and—more important—it does not go far enough when it comes to the resources that are needed. I have had feedback that the pressure is immense. At times, the hospitals are, in the words of the people whom I have met, not safe—the nurse to patient ratio is way beyond what is acceptable. Do you have a grasp of the extent of the problems in our hospitals? Do you accept what those nurses and trade unions are saying about the numbers of nurses being so low in comparison with the numbers of patients that there are serious safety issues in hospitals?

On Tuesday, the First Minister said that the advisory sub-group on education and children’s issues was due to meet and review whether the restrictions in schools should continue unchanged. Did that meeting take place? I might have missed the announcement.

My experience, like yours, has not been bad; I made a phone call, and the doctor at the other end said, “I want to see you.” However, I have examples of family members and others being told, “Just take some antibiotics”, and then ending up at hospital. The advice was completely wrong.

It is a question of clinical judgment. A GP or someone else in the health service might say that they are making a clinical judgment that they cannot see anyone, but given the stories of people being refused an appointment, being told that they can just get antibiotics and then ending up at hospital hours later with something seriously wrong with them—I am sure that there are many such stories; I have certainly seen that happen at first hand—is there not a duty on you to ensure that that does not happen? This is all about getting the balance right, and I am not sure that simply saying that we are not the clinical experts in such matters does that. Surely people should be able to get a face-to-face appointment of some sort if they are so ill that they feel that they need one.