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That will be very helpful as we think about what to recommend in our report.

Evelyn Tweed has a question on intersectionality, which will probably be our final theme. I will look around to see whether any of my colleagues wants to ask a further question, but we have only about five or 10 minutes left.

The second instrument is the National Health Service (Optical Charges and Payments and General Ophthalmic Services) (Scotland) Amendment Regulations 2022. The purpose of the negative instrument is to increase national health service optical voucher values by 2 per cent, to support more patients with eye problems being safely managed in the community, to enable remote consultations and to deliver other miscellaneous changes.

No motion to annul the regulations has been lodged. As members have no comments on the regulations, I propose that the committee does not make any recommendation in relation to them. Do members agree?

Members indicated agreement.

The third instrument is the National Health Service (Vocational Training for Dentists) (Miscellaneous Amendment) (Scotland) Regulations 2022. The regulations amend the National Health Service (Vocational Training for General Dental Practice) (Scotland) Regulations 2004, first, to change the employer of dentists undertaking vocational training from training practices to NHS Education for Scotland and, secondly, to continue an exemption from vocational training for dentists who hold certain European diplomas.

No motion to annul the regulations has been lodged.? Do members have any comments on them?

You are talking about people being on a precipice the whole time—thank you for that description. Gillian Mackay is next.

Another thing that was mentioned was the training of prison officers so that they can identify when somebody really needs healthcare. Could you give us a little bit more information and some examples of when the system has fallen down?

Thank you to you all for those comprehensive statements—so comprehensive, in fact, that you have probably answered the question that I was going to lead with, which was about your main asks in different policy areas.

I will quote our predecessor committee from session 4, which undertook an inquiry into health inequalities in 2015. In its report, it said that health inequalities

“would not be reduced without action to reduce inequalities in every other policy area and across every portfolio.”

We have just heard from Dr Wright that not only Scottish Government portfolios but UK Government portfolios have an impact on health inequalities. I was going to start by asking you all for your main asks, but you have given us a suite of asks that touch on a number of portfolio areas.

Therefore, I will dig into some of what Toni Groundwater talked about. I was in a break-out room with some of the people you support, and I have my notes from that session. After listening to those people and to you, I was taken aback by some of the things that those families are being put through. You led by talking about the health inequalities that family members suffer, and you also talked about adverse childhood experiences, but every person in that break-out room concentrated on the health inequalities affecting their loved ones in prison. That was their main focus, not themselves and not the impact that it had on their families, although that was evident from listening to them. Their main complaint was about their worry and anxiety for their partners, siblings, friends and so on who were in prison or custody and who were not getting access to their right to healthcare. You could see that that was having an effect on those people’s mental health.

In your statement, you said that there should be parity between the justice system and the healthcare system. I want to talk about the change that resulted from responsibility for the healthcare of prisoners moving from the SPS to the NHS. We heard families say that, when they had concerns about people getting access to medication for long-term conditions, the SPS said that the NHS was letting them down, and the NHS then said that it could not get access to the person because of the people running the prisons. Nobody knew who was responsible. Can you give us a bit more information? You deal with these things every day.

We will go to Sharon Wright first.

Would anyone else like to come in on that no wrong door issue? I think that somebody said in a written submission that it takes a lot for somebody to ask for help in the first place, so wherever they go should be a gateway to that help. I see Richard Meade nodding.

Thank you. Next, we will hear from Karen Lewis, from the Hub in Dumfries and Galloway.

We move on to the substantive item on our agenda, which is continuation of our evidence taking on health inequalities. This follows the series of informal engagement sessions that we undertook on 20 and 23 May to help us to understand people’s experiences in relation to health inequalities. They were very good and very intensive sessions where we heard from people with lived experience. This session is our opportunity to examine some of the issues that we heard about. We were all in different break-out rooms, so we should have a good spread of questions to ask the people who are in front of us today, and we will be able to dig more deeply into some of the things that we heard.

We have four witnesses on the panel to answer our questions and give us more information. I welcome to the committee Toni Groundwater from Families Outside, who is with us in person; Richard Meade from Carers Scotland, who is with us in person; Karen Lewis from The Hub in Dumfries and Galloway, who joins us online; and Dr Sharon Wright from the University of Glasgow, who also joins us online.

I believe that all four of you would like to make brief opening statements. We will hear from Toni Groundwater first.