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I am interested in the fact that we are taking a step back to involve people right at the beginning. Involving people with a wide range of experience does seem to be valuable.

We have heard about the support that is required right across the social care spectrum. Here I should probably remind everyone that I am a registered nurse. Over the summer, I spent time visiting the social care delivery team at Stewartry Care in Castle Douglas. Its work is varied and the people there are skilled and competent in delivering care for people in their own homes.

I am keen to ensure that people understand what the co-design process is. They might just assume that co-design and co-production are the same thing, but they are not. Did that point about there being co-design and not co-production come out in the consultation process?

There is a lot of information from the six reports on the Government’s website, and they are available in an accessible format. The reports are pretty comprehensive. I will probably need to read them in more detail, but I appreciate that.

Just to go back a bit, I recommend that people look at the Government’s website. There is comprehensive information on the national care service, with all the reports and information on the engagements over the summer and the work that has been done to connect locally. It is great that Stranraer was one of the places involved, because folk fae Stranraer always feel forgotten.

How does the Government get the message out that people should look at what is on the Government’s website to find out about the power of work that has been done over the summer? What is the best way to share that information?

I draw members’ attention to the fact that, while I was an NHS Scotland employee, I paid into an NHS Scotland pension.

I recently read that the Scottish Government is providing £700 million of support to mitigate things such as the bedroom tax. I know that this is straying into politics. The Barnett formula makes adjustments for Scotland, but we are constrained by the way that the budget is delivered in Scotland by another Government. Do we need to be looking at alternatives to how the Scottish Government’s block grant is delivered?

I am thinking about community pharmacy as another way to direct people—pharmacy first, for instance—and our national treatment centres, which have been established so that elective surgery can be done and emergency beds are not taking up the space for elective patients. That work has been done, but I feel like we are spinning plates sometimes because none of it is an overnight fix. I used the example of Professor Pekka Puska in Finland: it took three decades but, with that approach, he reduced the mortality of men from cardiovascular disease by 80 per cent.

Is the Scottish Government going in the right direction when it comes to budget choices around health and—on the back of Evelyn’s question—when it comes to helping people manage expectations as well?

Yes, and I need to remind everybody that I am a currently registered nurse. I forgot to say that at the beginning.

I have a quick question about the economy. Normally, we take gross domestic product as a measure of how successful a country is. However, we now have a Cabinet Secretary for Wellbeing Economy, Fair Work and Energy, so we are looking at wellbeing and we know that, if we help to get people out of poverty, that can support them into being more productive. Do you agree that supporting a wellbeing economy is an approach that we can take to how we budget for health? It will be relevant across portfolios when we are talking about things such as housing and poverty and addressing the issues that we face in Scotland.

Thanks.

My question is for Philip Whyte. I have some bits of paper in front of me about preventative approaches. Henry Dimbleby has written a lot about ultra-processed foods, and Professor Pekka Puska has done work in Finland on reducing the mortality of people through a whole-system approach by getting restaurants, cafes and supermarkets involved in providing healthier choices that are affordable for people. I am thinking about having preventative spend rather than secondary care constantly fighting fires. Something has to shift in the way that we invest, in order to stop folk getting into the hospital in the first place and to stop people being sick.

I am also looking at our paper on non-communicable disease prevention. My colleagues Gillian Mackay, Carol Mochan, Sandesh Gulhane and Foysol Choudhury and I have been part of a cross-party approach to look at non-communicable diseases, which contributed around 53,000 deaths in 2022 in Scotland. Something needs to be done differently. What do you suggest that we cut in order to move funding to preventative spend? There is only one pot of money, and it is a real challenge to figure out what we need to do differently.

Thank you.