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There are about 6,000 in local authorities and about 10,000 registered. What is the average working life of a social worker in Scotland?

That is what you are trying to do, but I asked why we are not seeing improvements. That work has been going on and it sounds great, but what is the product? What is the big benefit that we have had?

I refer to something that Professor Din was talking about: the qFIT, or quantitative faecal immunochemical test. One issue that I have in primary care is that I do not have access in all the different health boards to request tumour marker tests. Aside from tumour markers, one condition that probably has a worse outcome than cancer is heart failure, and I cannot request a proBNP everywhere. Surely it would be a good first step in detecting those things earlier if GPs were able to request such tests.

It is the standardisation that is the problem. I can request a proBNP in some places, while I cannot do so in other places. As a surgeon, how many sessions are you personally operating, on average?

You mentioned lung screening in your response to me.

That is relevant to what was said earlier about people coming out of university and not being trained highly enough, especially around self-directed support, and the fact that there is no protected time for social workers to do some learning, even though people in every profession need to continue to do professional development.

Training more people is one thing, but we also have to retain them. What can we do to retain social workers and stop them leaving the profession?

Okay. It seems rather disappointing that the strategy talks about

“opportunities for redesign of ways of working”

when surely IT, including basic IT, is the most important way of redesigning for interface.

I declare an interest as a practising NHS GP. This question is for Dr Kellock. We have strategies such as the dementia strategy, we have the Promise and we have the proposal for a national care service. There are times when those policies will rub up against one another. How will we be able to navigate our way through that?

Dr Kellock, I have a number of very direct questions, so it is fair enough if you do not know the answers. How many social workers do we have in Scotland?

It is safe to say that social workers are not sitting idle; they are very busy doing what they do. Some 40 per cent of social workers reported that their workload was unmanageable; 70 per cent of social workers reported that they could not complete their work in their contracted hours; and 20 per cent of the social work workforce left in 2020, with 40 per cent planning to leave in the next three years. On top of that, rural areas find it hard to recruit and train social workers.

However, everything that I see coming through from the Scottish Government requires social workers. For example, the implementation of the Children (Care and Justice) (Scotland) Bill requires 500 social workers. So, even with more money coming in to be spent, if we do not have the necessary number of social workers and the ones that we have leave after only six or seven years, how can we possibly implement policies successfully?