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A lot of work is going on in Government and in the NHS to establish safe staffing levels. There is work to ensure that our workforce is developing sustainably.

That issue is slightly separate from the work of the patient safety commissioner. Staffing can be a contributory factor to safety. However, in the examples that I gave in my earlier response—the mesh-injured women, the valproate-injured families and those who were given infected blood—safe staffing was not an issue; the problem was that those injuries happened and the system did not listen to people. The primary function of the safety commissioner will be to ensure that the patient’s voice and concerns are heard.

My colleagues may want to say more about safe staffing.

There will be a conversation as we go on. I have already mentioned the Scottish patient safety programme, which uses a really effective quality improvement methodology in the NHS to empower coalface clinicians to improve the system in which they work. That is such an effective method of improving patient safety that I think we would be crazy if we did not use it in all sorts of other systems.

When I was Minister for Children and Young People, we started to use similar methodology in care of children and young people. As we build a new national care service, we need to think about safety and quality and how to build that in with the bricks so that the system can improve itself continuously. However, I am not sure that the role of the patient safety commissioner applies to social care at the moment because it is essentially about ensuring that when people are harmed and when the system is harming people, their voices are heard.

No, it is fine.

That is challenging. As a scientist, I have a real passion for that issue. I think that, generally in our population, we do not have a great understanding of science. Science is not black and white and does not tell you what is right and wrong, but it helps you to answer questions. It is a way of seeking a way forward. All that it does is inform your decision making rather than tell you in a black and white way what you have to do. There is still always judgment in science. The phrase “follow the evidence base” is slightly less catchy, but that might have helped people to understand that it might be a changing feast.

There are not many positives to come from the pandemic, which has been the most testing time for the whole population, but I think that we have seen a far greater understanding of science in our population, which will stand us in good stead. We have seen a great deal of health literacy and risk assessment going on. People have gone to the Public Health Scotland website and found the data for their local area, which has informed their risk assessment of what they might need to do. I think that is a healthy and positive thing to come out of the pandemic.

As somebody who used to yell regularly at the television, I have seen a vast improvement in our scientific reporting and medical reporting. When I worked as a pharmacist, I used to regularly be frustrated by the way that significant clinical trials were communicated to the general population. We have seen that happen in a far better way. Journalists who are reporting on science and medicine have stepped up and done a pretty good job of communicating fairly complicated things to a population who generally are not scientists.

I do not know whether either of my colleagues wants to add anything.

I am sure that Jason Leitch will want to say a little bit more about that but, with any vaccine programme or vaccination, there will be a balance of risks and benefits. We have seen that very clearly played out as the JCVI gathered together the evidence for vaccinating children, where it felt that the benefit-risk balance was a little bit different. You need to take into account which population you are aiming your vaccine at. For some people, it will be a complete no-brainer because they will be particularly at risk from the consequences of that virus. For others, it will be a question of considering their own vulnerability and how much it helps the population for them to be vaccinated. Those are not clear-cut decisions.

Vaccines always carry risks. It is always a very small number of people who suffer adverse side effects. It is often the case that you cannot predict who will suffer those adverse side effects. If you could predict it, you would be able to take measures to avoid it. With a vaccine programme of the scale of this vaccine programme, where you are targeting pretty much the entire population, there are likely to be some people who suffer adverse events, but the benefits on a population level still outweigh the risks. That is a really important thing to communicate.

One of the challenges is that there were some side effects that might have been more predictable and there were people who thought that they perhaps should not have the vaccine. There was a question around people with allergies or allergic responses to vaccines. If you have had anaphylaxis in the past, it is very frightening to accept a vaccine where there is potentially a risk of allergy. Communicating messages that would reassure those individuals in relation to an individual assessment of whether someone is at particular risk from this vaccine is difficult. We could not communicate that at population level; that had to involve an individual discussion between clinician and patient at the time of vaccination.

You have just reminded me that I should mention www.travellingtabby.com, which was absolutely outstanding citizen science, was it not?

They have been on our television screens for so long helping to guide us through this challenging time. I think that there is definitely more interest in science among the population, and among the young population.

I would be delighted if an outcome of the pandemic were to be that more people were to go into science disciplines. There are lots of them, so that would be a great thing. There are very few of us in politics with science degrees, for example, which I know has been mentioned many times since I came into politics. There are just a handful of the 129 MPs who have science backgrounds. It would be useful if more people had such understanding, rigour, and the ability to analyse information and put it together to be able to cope with grey areas. To be able to make good decisions despite uncertainty and gaps is absolutely a useful skill in government, so let us have more science, please.

That is one of the challenges that we have faced throughout the pandemic. We rely on expert advice. For vaccines, we rely on the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation to give us advice on which groups should be targeted with vaccination. It can work only at a certain pace. People want to know now whether they will get a vaccine in the autumn. At the moment, the JCVI has not come out completely clearly. It has said that some of the population will be eligible, but it has not made a final statement on who will be eligible. The Scottish Government has largely followed JCVI advice, because it is absolutely the expert on vaccination and it will help us to make the most of the vaccination programme, which has been so transformative in this pandemic.

FACTS is: F, wear a face covering; A, avoid crowded spaces; C, clean your hands; T, observe two-metre distancing; and S, self-isolate. [Applause.]

I am lousy at acronyms, I have to admit. I find acronyms very hard. I can remember that acronym and I can remember the general meaning, but remembering what the individual instructions are is tricky. I agree that finding that sweet spot of simple messaging is difficult. I know that in England they went for—