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 671 contributions
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 25 April 2023
Gillian Mackay
Have I got time for another question?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 18 April 2023
Gillian Mackay
What you have said is powerful, about individual teams and individual sports people claiming the narrative.
Next week, we will have the broadcasters. If there was one thing that you wanted us to raise with them, what would it be?
09:45Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 18 April 2023
Gillian Mackay
Gemma Fay, I want to pick up on something that you said about the societal attitudes behind some of the things that we see—and, in particular, how that comes out in the media. For example, a lot of the media sports reports comment on fixtures for the Chelsea team but then comment on “the Chelsea women’s team” afterwards. They use that sort of language to distinguish between the two. Is it damaging to women’s sport to have that instead of “Chelsea men’s” and “Chelsea women’s”? Does it create, almost, a second-class distinction between the two? Do you think that it is done consciously, or do we need to continue to challenge it?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
My question comes off the back of Stephanie’s questions on facilities and how we maintain diversity in them, notwithstanding that some are up for closure because of budget cuts. I have heard from hockey clubs and various other clubs in my local area that 5G pitches are easier to rent but are not suitable for some sports. There could therefore be a slow creep into other sports that are more generally dominated by boys and men, thus shutting off some sporting diversity for others. Have you a view on how we might not only maintain that diversity of facilities but expand it to ensure that we have as wide a range of sports as possible available for people to try, as well as facilities that allow for general physical activity? As Emma Harper mentioned earlier, the Scottish weather is not always the most inviting for going out for a walk. We see that in cycles of people perhaps becoming less active over the winter compared with the summer.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
My question is particularly for Pamela Dudek.
Given the number of older buildings, local hospitals and so on across Sutherland and Caithness, and right across NHS Highland, what programmes are under way to keep those facilities in good condition and open in the first place so that people have those services close to home? What is under way to also ensure that all services are not centralised in Raigmore hospital?
Some of those buildings are very old—some of my family are from Sutherland, so I know how old those buildings are. How is the progress of work to make sure that they can take some of the new equipment that they were never built to take?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
I will follow up on something that Dr Stark said, which others might have an opinion on. She talked about strength training. When I was at school, we did a lot of sport-based PE, but not much gym-based PE. We did not learn how to do a squat, a deadlift or any of those things. That is not for every child, but those exercises underpin much of the training required to get better at the sports that people are doing, and much of that is based in the gym. Are we doing enough of that? Most people now get some of their activity in the gym, but there is a lot of misinformation online. Do we need to do more for younger people, so that they can learn to do that safely? I learned a lot of how to do that properly from my peers at university, when I was in my late teens or early twenties. A big opportunity is being missed earlier in life.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
How do the boards feel about the progress that they have made under the current escalation framework and the issues on which they have been escalated?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
I am particularly interested in the area of culture. I note the number of sites where NHS Highland operates and the number of workers who are potentially not coming into contact with a lot of colleagues. How do you overcome that challenge of ensuring that everybody’s voice is heard and that you are accurately hearing what is going on at different sites, given the small number of staff in some places and the potential for some relationships to be not very good? People may be much more easily identifiable if they make a complaint there, compared with what happens in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and some of the bigger hospital sites that we have, where raising concerns anonymously is slightly easier, I suppose.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 28 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
Do you feel that you are receiving adequate support to improve not just the things where you are still on level 3 but those other aspects of culture, so that you can continue to make progress? What other support do you feel needs to be in place to help to de-escalate the level 3 things while you keep improving on the things that are at level 2?
Criminal Justice Committee, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, Social Justice and Social Security Committee (Joint Meeting)
Meeting date: 22 March 2023
Gillian Mackay
Earlier, Natalie Don touched on the family approach. Although I totally welcome that approach, there might be various reasons why people do not have their immediate family involved in their recovery. Their immediate family might be the source of trauma or they might be estranged from their family for various reasons. Do you have plans to issue guidance around that, to make sure that, whatever that family set-up is—whether it is a biological family set-up or friends that someone treats as family—that support network is around that person and is involved in their treatment?