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Those are really helpful insights. There is a balance between passive advertising of availability versus engaging with groups of people—young women, in particular—who might not feel comfortable and who could feel intimidated by a sport such as boxing, and encouraging them to do a taster of it and have a go at it. Maybe the active schools programme could be looked at as an opportunity; it certainly sounds interesting.

We have heard stories about young people in physical education classes being split into groups to do stereotypical sports. The girls would go off and do dancing and the boys would go off and do football. That stereotypical streaming of different sports can be extremely counterproductive. Have you observed that happening, and how do you think the active schools programme could address it?

Okay. That is interesting.

I am conscious that yesterday the leadership of South Lanarkshire Council called for the Scottish Government to consider the creation of a swimming pool fund, similar to that which was announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer last week for swimming pools in England.

I go to Euan Lowe of Scottish Swimming first. Do you support those calls? Does Scottish Swimming have a view on how such a fund could be used to improve facilities and support the needs of women and girls?

During our evidence-taking session with Dr Henrietta Hughes, the Patient Safety Commissioner for England, we discussed the issue of escalation. She was emphatic about the need for collaboration and a culture of openness, rather than for an inquisitor who would come in and berate people for failures. That is an important insight to note.

However, where there have been egregious problems, there will need to be very clear recommendations that ought to be implemented. In situations in which there is an area of injustice or an issue that needs to be urgently addressed and which could not simply be left to collegiate encouragement, perhaps there is a need for an escalation process. In responding to my question about that, Dr Hughes said that it was quite early days and that she would not necessarily be clear about what the next step of escalation would be in that instance. Obviously, the reporting line in this case is to Parliament rather than to ministers. Does the minister have a view on how the bill might better define that process of potential escalation, if there is such a lack of co-operation in the future?

I raised the point about data with the English commissioner and asked her about the

“huge risk of data inundation”

and having to make sense of large streams and volumes of information that might have been collected for completely different purposes, might not be comparable, might not have the same baselines and might as a result have accuracy risks. In response to being asked how “meaningful conclusions” could be drawn from the different streams of data being fed into her office and how they would be processed, the commissioner said:

“Having a data and digital function in my team so that we can use and manipulate that data in a way that can bring fresh insight that will help the system to attend and listen to things that it may not have been aware of in the past is key.”

Moreover, Dr Duncan, the chief of staff, said that the commissioner was

“right to say that, without a data analytics function, the novel insights that a commissioner could have would be limited.”—[Official Report, Health, Social Care and Sport Committee, 21 February 2023; c 39.]

Do you agree with that assessment?

Thanks for that. Minister, the point that you hinted at earlier was important. We often hear qualitative insights from patients, as we did in relation to the mesh scandal. The Public Petitions Committee unpacked a lot of that because the system did not respond. Doctors were dismissing patients saying that it was psychosomatic or imagined. A data signal was not being transmitted through the healthcare system to illustrate that there was a problem. That sort of case might be an opportunity for the commissioner to instruct the gathering of data.

Thank you, convener.

Rather than simply take a laissez-faire approach to social media influencing, should the state have a more active role in promoting positive messaging through influencers to direct people in positive directions, particularly through targeted advertising to young people?

You mentioned the opportunity of collaboration across the system, which was also mentioned by the commissioner. She mentioned that partnership working would have value here. Is there an opportunity to further define that in the bill to say that there are obligations or say where we would expect interfaces to work in the system?

To go back to the point about powers, will there be an appropriate element of compulsion for the commissioner to exercise when it is instructing, for example, health boards to gather certain types of data based on complaints that have been picked up that we cannot verify through data? Is there a mechanism whereby the commissioner could say that people should start assessing the issue at primary or secondary care interfaces, to enable us to gain a greater understanding of the issue? Could that be defined?