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I am sorry to drag you back to a previous discussion, Dr Williams, but I have a supplementary question on the back of the questions that Elena Whitham was asking you about the role of assessment and diagnosis in the private or third sectors. It seemed to me that your answer quite accurately described the problem, but I could not quite get a sense of what you think the solution to that is. Clearly, we have frustration being expressed in relation to the financial unfairness, with some people being able to make the choice to go private, others being forced into debt and others feeling desperate because they cannot do that, and there is a sense of frustration because people are not getting the same responses from different GPs about whether diagnoses will be accepted and acted on.

Are you saying that the solution to that is to restrict or prohibit diagnoses in the private sector that do not reach a certain standard and then to accept all those that do, or that the solution is only to expand capacity in the NHS? Where do we go from here?

Good morning to our new panel of witnesses. As you will be aware, we have heard a lot of evidence about the variation in waiting times, in service provision and in the various timescales and so on for referrals to pathways to access services across different parts of Scotland. Can you give us a sense of the extent to which that variation is itself fundamentally a problem, or is variation simply something that we should live with in a country with multiple health boards that provide services in line with their different priorities? What could the Scottish Government do if it chooses to reduce or eliminate that variation and establish a standard universal set of expectations for people? Do health boards look at one another’s performance and treat that, informally, as what they need to be aspiring to? Is there any sense at all that health boards are trying to achieve not universality but some common expectations? I am happy to open that up to whoever would like to kick off.

I think that probably everyone has mentioned resources. That was unavoidable, so let us acknowledge that issue. Are there any other barriers beyond resources that you think we need to be aware of in delivering either the NAIT recommendations that witnesses have spoken about or the specification for children and young people that Dr Kidd talked about?

Does either the Scottish Government or any individual health board currently seek to develop a policy for issues such as diagnosis recognition? I suspect that the answer to that will be no. We have heard about the extremely patchy responses that people get when they speak to their GPs about diagnoses provided outside the NHS. Does any health board seek to achieve consistency on that at the moment?

Is the consensus diagnosis approach ever used for adults?

Thank you.

I thank all the witnesses for their evidence. I am keen to understand a little more about the balance between the benefits for people who might have an adverse reaction or an emergency in a safer environment and the benefit of having reduced drug paraphernalia in the local community, for which there is clear evidence, and the concerns that have been expressed about there being more unknown faces around, whether those are service users or dealers. I could not see anything in the written submissions that tells me whether you collect information about where your service users are travelling from. It might not be easy to get objective data, but do you have a sense of whether people are travelling across the city or even from further afield or whether it is overwhelmingly people who would otherwise be using in another environment in the Calton area?

Good morning. I want to press you a little further on the issues that Paul Sweeney raised about the Thistle and, more generally, about how you see the future of safer drug consumption facilities.

We acknowledge that it is early days for the Thistle, and that a full evaluation is to come, but let us assume that it evaluates well. You pushed back a little on the issues around reserved legislation. For the life of me, I cannot understand why we did not devolve that legislation in 2016, when we addressed other irrational reservations in the Scotland Act 1998 on a consensual, cross-party basis. I wish that we had been able to do that. Let us assume that the Government will be successful in making the case either to change or to devolve the legislation, and that the legal barriers can be removed.

You presumably have some idea in your head already about what level of provision of that type of facility there ought to be in order to address the needs not just of one community but of multiple communities around Scotland. Do you have a sense of how extensive a network of that type of facility a city such as Glasgow ought to have, or that the country ought to have, if those legal barriers were removed and if the evaluation of the early phase proves to be positive?

I absolutely take the point about the connection to drug deaths and to places where there is a particular cluster, albeit that those patterns may change over time. Some of the evidence that we heard earlier and that we have read in the written submissions shows that that is not the only benefit of such a facility. It is clear that the reductions in drug paraphernalia in communities and in people being exposed to drug taking in communities and other settings are significant benefits.

There could be the opportunity to achieve those benefits in other parts of communities that may not have the same cluster of deaths at a particular time to justify a fixed facility. I am curious to know whether there is a sense in the Government or in the public health community in Scotland more generally of where this could go if the barriers were removed.

Have the new UK ministers that you mentioned shown an interest in visiting the facility and seeing for themselves what is happening?