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I will make a wider point to start with before focusing on the petition itself. The dedication of our staff who work in remote and rural areas is without exception. They are extremely dedicated and work very hard. However, despite their hard work, I feel that our patients who live in remote and rural areas get a far worse service than those who live in urban communities. There are a number of reasons for that, and Emma Harper has mentioned a few of them, including travel and there not being the required expertise. We also know that there is a lack of staff in remote and rural areas in comparison with urban areas. That applies to nurses, doctors and GPs. Retention is also important in those areas.

I have done a GP shift in Dumfries and Galloway, so I know that travel is one of the issues. When I drove to my shift, the road was flooded. At one point, I genuinely thought that I was going to drown. Admittedly, there was a storm. Patients face travel issues day in, day out in rural areas. What we offer is not good enough.

I would advocate our looking into rural healthcare generally and having an inquiry that would incorporate a lot of what we have spoken about and a lot of what the petitions highlight.

On PE1845, I am not sure that an agency is the way forward. However, I think that the issues that it raises need to be part of our potential work on rural healthcare.

My first question is very straightforward: do you feel that you have enough resources?

Do you have enough resources to be able to expand as you want to?

I have a couple of questions. The first goes back to the voices of staff, and is directed to Shaun Gallagher. Matthew McClelland spoke about whistleblowing legislation, but my understanding is that people who sit on health boards are not covered by that. Does that not create an issue, especially when we are talking about a blame culture? Should we take steps to include members of health boards in such legislation?

It is reassuring to hear that you are all speaking—one would expect you to, of course, but it still reassuring.

I suppose that the question is about the investigation. You said that you had previously been in areas where a lot of investigation was done, and that takes a certain amount of skill, time and resource to do. I appreciate that you have been in post for only 100 days, but do you feel that your role is to find those themes and perhaps pass them on to the relevant organisation, or do you feel that your job is to move on to the ones that you want to investigate further?

The remit for the Scottish commissioner is already a bit bigger than yours. A lot of people have come to the committee and asked for other things to be included in that remit, so the role seems to be expanding. Do you feel that our current budget and resource will be enough, or do you feel that it will be okay for the initial phase, with an agile team, but that we would need scope for future expansion?

I understand that you are not able to take on individual cases. However, I go back to the idea of a golden thread. If, for example, multiple people come to you from different parts of the country and present you with a similar issue, will you unfortunately miss that because you cannot investigate individual cases, or do you log the information to see whether there is a golden thread that you are able to pick up?

I will pick up on what the convener said about individual cases. Dr Williams, I appreciate that there are lots of different ways of doing things, but might it be useful for the commissioner to be able to hear about and log individual cases in order to find the golden thread that runs through them?

Everyone on the panel has spoken about other areas that they would like to put under the wing of the patient safety commissioner. Under the current proposals, four members of staff will be allocated to the role, and there are many other commissioners, which is very expensive. Do you feel that the patient safety commissioner will be adequately resourced to handle the situation now and in the future? I direct that question to Shaun Gallagher and Matthew McClelland, who both mentioned the possibility of the commissioner having extra areas of responsibility.

You have a set budget and you report to the Health and Social Care Committee. Do you feel able to tell that committee what you have found out so far and what you need to be able to go a little bit further or, because your funding comes from the Department of Health and Social Care, do you have to take that route—or do you have to take both routes?