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You said earlier that you were told about changes on the day before the bill came out. What meaningful consultation have you had, and where do you want to see that going?

The question was literally about what you said about their not being able to go through it all and put together a coherent argument.

I want to move away from that aspect and turn to accountability. Earlier, we heard about the Scottish ministers having meetings with the care boards. Where do you foresee accountability lying?

How many were excluded? I could not see that number.

I wonder whether we might need to say publicly who we have invited and who has declined our invitation.

Towards the end of your concluding remarks, you said that there was a strong argument against having a one-size-fits-all model in Canada, due to geographical variation. I feel that Scotland, too, has significant geographical variation. How does your comment about Canada fit with recommendation 1, which is on care services being provided on a consistent basis, and recommendation 3, which is on taking

“A clear ‘one system, one budget’ approach”?

I would like to ask Professor Glasby first. The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities has repeatedly said that improvements to social care need to be made now. I heard you say earlier that, initially, things are likely to get worse. Therefore, these changes will only disrupt these improvements. Could more immediate action be taken to address existing social care issues? Might the NCS jeopardise these changes?

My question is for Sir Harry Burns. You have spoken about data. One of the things that I am frustrated by is the lack of data. We need to find out what we have now, identify the change that we are going to make and what change we would then see in the data, and then robustly collect that data. I know that you said that you had stopped on that, but I would like to hear a bit more about it.

I feel that PE1890, on finding solutions to recruitment and training challenges for rural healthcare in Scotland, is particularly important. We know, for example, that it is very difficult to recruit GPs, and we know that nursing provision across Scotland is not uniform. We have significantly worse recruitment in rural areas than we have in urban areas. I could go on with more and more examples.

PE1890 should be brought in front of the health boards. There are rural health boards that should be explaining what they are doing right now. We could follow that up with a meeting with the cabinet secretary to find out what is happening centrally. That is a really important area that we have not got a grasp on, unfortunately.

My only concern about that is that there are health boards that do not come in front of us and there are health boards that hide—I do not want to use that word, but I will. We need to ensure that rural health boards come in front of us and that we get all health boards in front of us, so that we can have that discussion directly. In one of our previous sessions, the health boards that appeared were ones that were not under great scrutiny. It is very important that we get everyone here.

Thank you for the presentation on the work that you have done. I have one question, which is about your methodology. You excluded papers that were published in languages other than English, but that presents a problem. Japanese is the dominant language in Japan, French is the dominant language in France and German is the dominant language in Germany—we could keep going like that. How many papers—and how many for each language—were excluded on that basis? If you excluded so many papers, how can you say that your research on those particular countries is robust?