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Incentives such as golden hellos are important in encouraging people to go to such areas, but we have heard that there are significant differences in the pay of our colleagues, depending on where they work. We were told in evidence that sometimes such workers are band 3 and sometimes they are band 4, which makes a huge difference to the amount that they make.

There is no point in incentivising someone to take a job in a particular area if they will make significantly less money, so should we standardise the level that our allied health professionals start on and then add on incentives to get people into those rural areas that are harder to recruit to?

We have touched on the issue of inequality being not just about wealth, with rurality causing an inherent inequality. It is clear that staffing issues are not evenly distributed around the country. Earlier, you extolled link workers and spoke about how good they are. I love my link worker and think that they are brilliant. However, link workers are not available to people in areas such as Forth valley or Aberdeenshire. At the heart of ensuring that we have equality, we must ensure that the staff who are available in Glasgow or Edinburgh are available throughout the country.

Therefore, how will you ensure that areas that are hard to recruit to and which do not have staff will get the staff, and that that process will be rolled out in a manner that means that such an approach will be at the heart of recruitment strategies?

My question goes back to one of the things that you said about pensions. In Wales, they have solved the issue of doctors paying to go to work through pensions by recycling of employers contributions. That allows the doctors who are in danger of paying to go to work to come out of the scheme. It is a fairly good solution, and it also brings in more tax because the money is taxed. My question is why we have not gone down that route more quickly, because it seems to be working in another devolved nation.

Cabinet secretary, behavioural change is very important—of course it is—but I will give you two examples of the issue here. When I was at Yorkhill children’s hospital, people were smoking by a big sign with a picture of a sick child on it that said, “Please don’t smoke here—it drifts up to my window”.

Forth Valley royal hospital has done more than I have seen other hospitals do. When I was there, it had big signs everywhere, and there was cross-hatching on the floor that said, “Do not smoke here”. The hospital employed somebody who went round telling people not to smoke there. He tried to take details and issue fines, which was the right thing for him to do. He is a lovely guy, but people just abused and ignored him, as they ignore the other measures. If someone is standing in front of a picture of a sick kid and smoking, it will be really difficult to effect behavioural change.

Initially, like the indoor smoking ban, the measure needs to be policed, and it needs to be policed with teeth. I am picking up that point from Paul O’Kane as well. We need to police that really well, particularly at the start, in order to kick-start behavioural change. Will you look at that again to see what we can do to really clamp down in those initial phases?

Christiana, I would like to suggest something in relation to what you said—that anywhere there is a human being, we need to have a listening ear, we need the help, and we need to be holistic. What are we doing to help people coming across from Ukraine as far as link working is concerned? The social prescribing aspect will be key here, I think.

My other question is about retention. I am a bit concerned about that, because a report in 2020 suggested that one in three link workers planned to resign within a year due to a lack of support and supervision. To what extent are those problems undermining the shift to social prescribing? What can we do to reverse that?

I want to pick up on something that Alison Leitch said at the beginning of the session, about how much GPs like having link workers. As a working GP, I can tell you that I love my link worker, because they take a lot of work away from me around social issues, navigating benefits and so on. I simply cannot do those things, because I do not have time, so I absolutely love my link worker.

I have two questions. One is on recruitment and the other is on retention. The Scottish Government was looking to recruit 250 community link workers in GP surgeries by 2021, but there are areas such as Aberdeenshire, Forth Valley, Midlothian, Highlands and the Western Isles without any link workers. What assessment have you made of the efforts that have been made in that regard? How can we stop areas from falling further behind?

Chris, you said that ALISS has been around for 12 years, and that communication is not what it should be. As a GP, I had never heard of ALISS. No GP that I know has ever heard of it. Organisations who have given evidence to us have not heard of it. It is not that the comms are not what they should be; they are non-existent. After 12 years, I would expect a good data source to be something that people use and know about. Is ALISS value for money, or should we look to use that money for something else?

Scott Henderson said that GPs were not a target for ALISS. Up to 60 per cent of the things that GPs do are social. In 2018, the new GP contract came in, which had a focus on link workers. I would say that ALISS would have been a wonderful resource for GPs to know about—perhaps not 12 years ago but certainly from 2018 onwards. Why were GPs not targeted? Not doing so seems nonsensical.

The issue of a single electronic patient record has come up a lot. Many of the organisations that we heard from spoke about the great benefits that the creation of a single electronic patient record could bring.

I have two questions, the first of which is for Dr Paul Perry. How useful would such a record be from an out-of-hours NHS 24 point of view? What progress has been made in that regard since December 2021?