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John Scott made a range of recommendations in his report, and we accepted all the key ones. Implementing some of them will require changes to primary legislation and I hope that we can aim to introduce primary legislation during the current parliamentary session to give effect to some of the measures that will be needed to do that.

Good morning, convener. Public Health Scotland continues to monitor Covid-19 levels and is testing for the new variants. That is largely being carried out through people who have been admitted into our hospitals, who might present with symptoms, and that is being used to inform our approach to how we continue to manage Covid-19.

Members will be aware that the decision was made a number of months ago, in line with other parts of the United Kingdom and countries globally, to manage Covid-19 in the way that we would manage any other seasonal infection. That continues to be our approach, but we are monitoring very closely any changes to the pattern and rates of infections. That will inform any further decisions that we make about any changes to our approach that we might have to make.

We will also continue to keep in place a range of testing arrangements for individuals who are being discharged from hospital into social care settings, for example. We have taken a slightly different approach on that from some parts of the UK in order to maintain a level of vigilance. That means that a level of testing is still taking place for vulnerable categories of patients, particularly if they are going to be transferred into social care settings.

We are engaged with the chief medical officer, who is engaged with the other CMOs across the UK, and work is being taken forward through the genome sequencing process, which is, obviously, operating at international level. I do not know the full clinical details around that, but work is being carried out to test the impact of the existing vaccination programme against the new variant.

I also understand that vaccine producers are monitoring whether they have to make any amendments to their existing vaccines, but all that work to monitor the on-going situation is being taken forward across the UK and globally. At this stage, we are still waiting for those reports to come back, but there is a level of vigilance in place to ensure that our decisions are made on an informed evidence base.

Our social care staff are critical in supporting and sustaining our health and social care systems, which are interlinked and are key to each other. The social care setting has traditionally been undervalued, which has been reflected in the rate of pay within social care compared to that in healthcare.

We have taken forward a programme of work to make social care a more attractive working environment and to reflect the value of our social care staff, which has resulted in an increase in their pay. Pay has been increased to £12 an hour over the past two years. We have already taken it up to £10.90, and the pay increase in the sector will be equivalent to more than 14 per cent in two years.

The objective behind that is to make care a more attractive profession and to support the retention of social care staff to make the sector more resilient. The principal objective is to try to get more people into care and to support and encourage those working there to remain there in future by providing them with better pay.

Any form of industrial action is hugely disruptive to our NHS, not only to staff and to the management process but to patients. To see that, we only have to look at England, where there has been repeated industrial action and where I believe that more than 7.5 million patients are on waiting lists and that almost a million procedures and appointments have been cancelled as a result. That is the immediate impact, and there will be a cumulative impact caused by backlogs in the system.

The system and staff are already under enormous pressure and adding persistent industrial action to that demoralises staff even further and makes them feel undervalued, bringing all the challenges that go with that. My deal with the junior doctors involved acknowledging and recognising the real challenges that they face because of pay erosion, and we managed to negotiate an agreement with them to avoid industrial action.

My big concern with industrial action is that it is not only disruptive to patients but demoralises people who work in the system even further, which has consequent challenges, and puts people off working in the NHS as a result of the disruption and difficulties.

There is a monetary cost to settling those matters. However, we would create even bigger challenges for ourselves if we did not try to address the issues. The challenges that we would have faced from industrial action would have been even greater—they would have been worse—than dealing with the financial challenges arising from the pay settlement.

NHS Education for Scotland will take forward work on the centre, which was announced last week. Given some of the specific challenges that we have in rural areas around the delivery and sustainability of primary care, as Tess White talked about this morning, the first two years of the programme will focus on primary care, which will be the centre’s initial priority. The centre will start that work as of October.

No—it will not be sufficient. It is one aspect. Part of the challenge around social care comes from the fact that we, as a society, have not valued it as much as we value other professional groups, particularly when comparing social care with health. That is a wider societal issue, which we have to be honest and open about, but the consequences of not valuing social care are now clear, given the challenge that it now faces.

Pay is one part of the matter. The other important aspect is to see social care as a career of choice, with a career pathway and progression and opportunities stemming from that. We are exploring whether we could do more to create career pathways in social care, to encourage people to go into it and build up experience within it, and to pursue opportunities to go into other professional groupings.

One area of work that we are considering is the potential creation of pathways into regulated professions, perhaps through approaches such as the nursing apprenticeship model, so that someone’s extensive experience in social care will allow them to progress into some of the regulated professions through a different route from those that are available at present. Creating career pathways is critical to encouraging people to go into social care.

As I say, pay is one part of it, but social care has to be a credible career option for people, and we need to do a lot more around that. Some of the work that we are doing is aimed at encouraging people who are going into social care by providing them with specific routes into other professional groupings if that is what they choose at some point in the future.

Is this in relation to people with long Covid not having access to—

Do you mean for long Covid?

We are on a path to understanding long Covid much more effectively. You might be aware that quite a bit of global research is taking place to understand the impact of long Covid and the most appropriate treatments for it.

My understanding is that, as it stands, no single treatment type is appropriate for long Covid patients. We often have to try to provide a holistic form of treatment. For example, the service that is being offered in Glasgow—the long Covid pathway—has a range of different clinical inputs, from physiotherapy, through occupational therapy to psychological services. All of those are about trying to address some of the issues that can present with patients who experience long Covid.

It is fair to say that we are in a learning environment on how we treat long Covid. From some of the patients with long Covid whom I have met, I know that its presentation is variable and they often have different needs. That is why some of our NHS boards look to provide services much more holistically with a range of different supports that can be provided to patients and to tailor those to best reflect patients’ circumstances.

We are all learning more about long Covid. That will continue to influence how we intend to deliver services for patients with long Covid in the future.