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Universal services are key in ensuring that folks are able to access the services that they need. Obviously, delivery often varies in different parts of the country, but it is essential that we get the provision right for every woman and every family.

Joined-up care and an holistic approach are key in supporting women and their families during the perinatal period. We are taking specific action to improve provision of joined-up services for women and families with complex needs, including those who have substance use issues. Maree Todd’s work is intertwined with mine, and we work closely with Angela Constance, the Minister for Drugs Policy. Substance use, which was mentioned earlier, is obviously an important issue.

In order to get this right, we need to take a cross-Government approach and to work in partnership with the managed clinical network, the third sector and—I cannot emphasise this enough—folks with lived experience.

We intend to hold a stakeholder event in the near future. It will be designed to discuss ways to improve the quality and consistency of support and services for women and families.

To date, we have invested £1.8 million in third sector services within the perinatal and infant mental health portfolio. We have publicly committed to investing up to £1 million per annum in third sector provision. A key part of our third sector work has been investment in the sector as well as funding specific organisations.

I know from conversations that I had last week that none of this is easy and that third sector organisations would prefer it if we could provide multiyear funding. I wish that that were the case, but the UK Treasury will not give us multiyear funding, which creates difficulties.

We have given as much comfort as we can to third sector organisations. I certainly value their work. We will continue to work with them and will do our level best to provide the resources and the services that women and families need across the country.

Thank you, convener.

I welcome the opportunity for my colleague Maree Todd, Hugh Masters and I to assist the committee with the inquiry into perinatal mental health in Scotland.

I thank everyone who responded to the inquiry. The huge range of responses from professionals, organisations and individuals shows just how important the issue of perinatal mental health is right now, so I am pleased to be able to provide my support by coming here today.

I also express my gratitude to those who kindly shared their personal experiences, which helps us to open up the conversations, to address stigma and, most important, to get a better understanding of what works well and what we need to do better.

We recognise the impact that the pandemic has had on the mental health of new and expecting parents. The responses to the inquiry highlight the sobering reality of what that can look like daily.

As a Government, we are making significant investments in our mental health services to encourage recovery and renewal as we emerge from the pandemic. It is in that context that I would like to share a brief summary of my vision for perinatal mental health services in Scotland.

Since 2019, the perinatal and infant mental health programme board has overseen investment across community perinatal mental health services, the third sector, mother and baby units, infant mental health services and maternity and neonatal psychological interventions.

In October, we published the new “Perinatal and Infant Mental Health Programme Board: delivery plan 2019-2020”, which sets out the next steps in our ambitious and compelling long-term goals not only to develop and sustain perinatal and infant mental health services in the most challenging times, but to ensure a systems approach to service development and delivery of those vital services.

We will continue to build on the achievements of the programme board to offer the right kind of support to those who need it, at the right time. This year, more young parents, infants, fathers and those who have previously experienced pregnancy and neonatal loss are receiving support, thanks to the organisations that are funded through our small grants fund for the third sector.

The programme board will also continue to ensure that lived experience is at the heart of service development, implementation and provision. As I mentioned earlier, it is incredibly important to us that service provision be led by the needs of women and families, and that it builds on good practice and learning from positive and negative experiences of current services.

We will take forward the work of the new delivery plan in collaboration with our partners and we will ensure that there is continued focus on raising awareness, promoting understanding and reducing stigma.

I am extremely grateful to our statutory and third sector services for their continued passion and co-operation in delivering our strategic aims during the pandemic. With continued collaborative working, we can offer invaluable support for perinatal and infant mental health services across Scotland in providing a lifeline to parents, carers and families when they need it most.

The inquiry responses also touch on pregnancy and baby loss; Maree Todd will answer questions on those issues. I assure the committee that, with the rest of the Scottish Government, Maree Todd and I recognise the tragic impact of baby loss and the profound effect that it can have on the lives of the bereaved families. We are committed to ensuring that women and families are provided with the right information, care and support, taking into account their individual circumstances.

I look forward to working closely with you all on our important agenda for perinatal mental health to ensure not just that we are listening to the women and families of Scotland but that we inform our policies with their lived experiences in order to deliver high-quality and person-centred care.

I will turn to your question, convener. We have made real progress on delivering on the report’s recommendations. Since March 2019, we have invested more than £16 million in perinatal and infant mental health services to develop a range of services, from specialist acute in-patient services through to third sector support for women and families who are in the perinatal period. We are focused on ensuring equitable access to sustainable mental health support throughout folks’ pregnancies, as well as on ensuring that we get it right during the perinatal period and in the child’s infancy.

The voices of lived experience must be at the heart of our approach—I will probably say that again and again today, because I believe that it is immensely important in getting policy development and service delivery right.

The programme board is making good progress on meeting the recommendations on delivering effective services. For example, it is providing £6 million of funding in 2021-22 across all health boards to establish specialist community perinatal mental health teams.

In health boards that have more than 3,000 births a year, we have also funded enhanced psychological support for maternity and neonatal settings. Five boards—Fife, Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Lanarkshire and Lothian among them—are in the process of establishing dedicated multidisciplinary infant mental health teams, with a majority of other health boards embedding an infant mental health focus within their perinatal teams.

We have funded an increase in staffing for mother and baby units and have created the mother and baby unit family fund to support families in visiting their loved ones in in-patient care. We have also established the perinatal and infant mental health third sector fund, which so far has supported more than 2,000 parents, parents-to-be and infants. That comes with £1.8 million of funding.

Beyond that, the committee will also be interested in finding out what is happening on the ground. We are looking very closely at the overview of service developments across Scotland. The situation is improving; some parts of the country were slow in using the resources that were allocated to them, but Hugh Masters, the board and I have been in fairly regular contact with some boards to ensure that they are back on track.

On the service development front, we are looking at four key areas: perinatal mental health, infant mental health, the neonatal psychological interventions in the larger boards that I referred to earlier and, most important, the lived experience of and the level of engagement that boards are having with parents and families with regard to service delivery.

Your question covers a number of issues. When I came into post and started looking at the matter—I looked at it as a constituency member, too—I saw quite clearly that some areas were doing better than others in delivery as well as in recruitment, which is key to development of services. Some areas had used the resources that we had given them well, but some health boards had spent barely any of the money, recruitment was slow and the level of engagement with folks with lived experience was poor.

That situation has changed. I am not saying that everything in the garden is rosy; I think that there is still work to do in some areas, but folks are being recruited. NHS Highland and NHS Grampian in the north worried me, because they were pretty slow. However, that is changing and they are now recruiting.

Moreover, in my view, the level of engagement with people with lived experience was not always as good as it should have been. Not long ago, I met Let’s All Talk North East Mums—or LATNEM—which is a women’s group in Aberdeenshire. I know that you have been contacted by some of those folks as a constituency member, convener. They had mixed experiences of services and did not feel that they were listened to enough. I think that that situation has changed.

After having spoken to NHS Highland late last week, the board has sent me this week information about its work on communicating with and consulting families and the third sector. It shows real improvement in that. Its recruitment situation is getting better, too.

Convener, I am something of an old-fashioned boy—a bit simplistic, some would say—so what I have is a set of report cards that we will keep updated so that we can look at the progress that is being made across the country. What I see in the overview is more green lights than there were, some ambers where further improvements have to be made and fewer reds than there were at the beginning. However, the committee can be assured that I will continue to engage with boards that have been a bit slow in developing services and not quite good enough in allowing folks with lived experience to help.

I am a toonser from the north-east rather than a country boy but, as I pointed out, I well understand the difficulties that often exist in accessing services in rural and island communities.

We have to adapt service delivery. Boards are often best placed to know their areas, but we want to make sure that, in shaping those services, we listen to women and families when they tell us what they need. The Grampian resilience hub, which I mentioned, might be a solution that can be replicated elsewhere. I think that such a solution would work as well in Dumfries and Galloway as it does in rural Aberdeenshire.

As colleagues who heard me speak in my previous role will know, I am a great believer in exporting best practice. Where we find best practice, we will spread it far and wide. Hugh Masters and his team on the board have been doing that anyway, but we will continue to do it. As I said, we will also continue to look for nuggets of information from service users about what works for them and we will try to replicate that across the board.

In this regard, as in every other area, we will look at the best practice. Delivery will need to be adapted for certain parts of the country, but we will try to ensure that services are shaped by the voices and opinions of lived experience.

I should say to the committee that we have just engaged our second participation officer to link with minority ethnic communities and other equality groups, as part of our work in listening to the voices of lived experience. Hugh Masters mentioned resources that we have given to the Amma women’s group. We also have the experts by experience reference group, which is working with Amina—the Muslim Women’s Resource Centre to understand their challenges better. With our small grants funding, we have also funded multicultural family days for peer support.

The equality impact assessments that we did highlighted stigma around perinatal mental health issues among BAME groups, but that stigma exists across all communities. We have a huge amount of work to do across the board to destigmatise those issues. That is going to take a lot of work, and we all need to work together to ensure that there is a greater understanding of the needs of women and families in that area. I am grateful to the committee for carrying out this inquiry, because your findings will add to the information that we already have.

Then we will have to act accordingly. We have a situation in which some women feel so stigmatised that they cannot even go into a bookshop to buy a book with the information about how they are feeling. The small grants funds and the work of LATNEM women and others who are recognising these kinds of issues are ensuring that folks have easy access to such things. All of us should be working together to destigmatise mental health issues, whether in the BAME community or in other communities across the board.

Those are additional practitioners across all services. Those psychological practitioners will cover a range of services. It is extremely important that we get it right in this area, as in others. Having kept a very close eye on recruitment, I think that we are doing well. We also have to ensure that we retain those folks as we move forward, and we need to grow for the future.

I do not have the information at my fingertips on who is accessing all those modules, but we can get back to the committee with the information that we hold. Hugh Masters has put an R in the box, so he can perhaps come in with some more detailed information.

As I said to Ms Mochan, we have worked with NHS Education for Scotland to embed perinatal mental health in undergraduate education, to increase the number of psychology trainees at postgraduate level, and to roll out the suite of materials that has been mentioned to make them accessible to all professionals across Scotland. The aim is to further develop expertise at all levels across specialist and universal services. Importantly, we have committed to investment in perinatal and infant mental health services beyond the life of the programme board, which will allow health boards to recruit the required staff on permanent contracts and will support the recruitment and retention of staff and the development of centres of expertise.

That expertise is grand—it is brilliant—but we also want others to be able to access the kind of educational materials that Emma Harper has talked about. We have made that possible. If Hugh Masters does not have the details on who is accessing the training, we will write to the committee on that.

Convener, a very clever person has managed to get me some figures, which show that 700 practitioners have completed the stigma module alone.

Would it be appropriate to make some opening remarks before answering your question, convener?