The Official Report is a written record of public meetings of the Parliament and committees.
The Official Report search offers lots of different ways to find the information you’re looking for. The search is used as a professional tool by researchers and third-party organisations. It is also used by members of the public who may have less parliamentary awareness. This means it needs to provide the ability to run complex searches, and the ability to browse reports or perform a simple keyword search.
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
Depending on the kind of search you want to do, one of these views will be the best option. The default view is to show the report for each meeting of Parliament or a committee. For a simple keyword search, the results will be shown by item of business.
When you choose to search by a particular MSP, the results returned will show each spoken contribution in Parliament or a committee, ordered by date with the most recent contributions first. This will usually return a lot of results, but you can refine your search by keyword, date and/or by meeting (committee or Chamber business).
We’ve chosen to display the entirety of each MSP’s contribution in the search results. This is intended to reduce the number of times that users need to click into an actual report to get the information that they’re looking for, but in some cases it can lead to very short contributions (“Yes.”) or very long ones (Ministerial statements, for example.) We’ll keep this under review and get feedback from users on whether this approach best meets their needs.
There are two types of keyword search:
If you select an MSP’s name from the dropdown menu, and add a phrase in quotation marks to the keyword field, then the search will return only examples of when the MSP said those exact words. You can further refine this search by adding a date range or selecting a particular committee or Meeting of the Parliament.
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
There are two ways of searching by date.
You can either use the Start date and End date options to run a search across a particular date range. For example, you may know that a particular subject was discussed at some point in the last few weeks and choose a date range to reflect that.
Alternatively, you can use one of the pre-defined date ranges under “Select a time period”. These are:
If you search by an individual session, the list of MSPs and committees will automatically update to show only the MSPs and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of MSPs and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of MSPs and committees will update to show the information that was current at that time.
All Official Reports of meetings in the Debating Chamber of the Scottish Parliament.
All Official Reports of public meetings of committees.
Displaying 1148 contributions
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
Thank you.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
We are running out of time—okay.
Max Warner, you have done modelling around investment in prevention to keep folk healthier. What modelling has been done to show that up-front investment will prevent cancer, reduce obesity and diagnose type 2 diabetes earlier, and have you done modelling that shows that preventing things now will save £X in terms of secondary care?
10:45Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
Thank you. The convener is giving me the eye, so I think that I should make that my final question.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
You said that cervical cancer screening uptake has reduced, but I am aware that there is self-sampling research going on now, and there is also research about urine testing for the human papillomavirus. Would that help? It is less invasive than traditional screening, so can we chivvy along that research so that we can also use either self-sampling or urine testing to screen people?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
I have a quick question for Max Warner, as I am conscious that he has not said a lot.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
Good morning to you all. I am interested in the good work that is being done on establishing rapid cancer diagnostic services. They were launched in Dumfries and Galloway, Ayrshire and Arran, Lanarkshire and the Borders in 2021, since when the uptake for bowel cancer screening seems to have become the highest ever in Scotland.
On 30 April 2022, there was a 67 per cent uptake in people returning their bowel screening kits, which is the highest in the programme’s history. Do we have enough data about breast screening, bowel screening and other screening uptake and how that leads to the requirement for intervention? I am looking at Katie Cuthbertson, because I got most of that information from the centre for sustainable delivery.
09:45Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
I must remind everybody that I am still a registered nurse, and I worked in the operating theatre and recovery room in NHS Dumfries and Galloway. I am looking at information that says that patients are sicker than they were pre-pandemic and that they have multiple comorbidities. How does making a patient ready for surgery affect waiting times and preparation? Is that a factor that we need to think about? I see Peter Hastie, Katie Cuthbertson and Professor Din nodding.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
You have answered a lot of questions about cancer treatment waiting times, and we have said a little about pre-operative screening. I would like to pick up on what Sandesh Gulhane said about the perioperative environment, I have worked there, so I know that you need lab and X-ray support, recovery rooms and pre-operative support. That is why elective surgeries are not done at 10 o’clock at night. The capacity of the perioperative environment depends on the wider team. I know orthopaedic surgeons who would be really happy to just do arthroscopies and hips and knees all day, but the wider team is required for those.
Where should there be improvements? What could be done to improve cancer treatment approaches? We have addressed the diagnostic part, but then there is intervention. We might need more CT scanners, but we also need people to read the scans and diagnose patients from them. The situation is complex, but can you suggest anything that could be done differently? I will come first to Katie Cuthbertson and then to Professor Din.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
I am interested in the improvement plan, which has been updated for 2023 to 2027. I would like to hear your thoughts about how that update is different to previous plans. Does it allow people to have more choice about and control of the plans for their care?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 4 June 2024
Emma Harper
I want to ask about technological innovation and the use of artificial intelligence, which could help to reduce bed days, for instance. Last week Dr Tom Mackay, Catherine Kelly and Dr Mary Melville from NHS Borders gave a presentation to the lung health cross-party group, which I co-convene, about keeping chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and asthma patients out of hospital. They showed us that, among that small amount of patients, the implementation of artificial intelligence technology saved 236 bed days and removed the need for patients in remote and rural areas to have to make 50-mile or 100-mile round trips to get to hospital. I should say that patients in the NHS Dumfries and Galloway area have to travel similar distances.
What are your thoughts about the implementation of technology such as AI for out-of-hospital assessments, and can you tell us what other exciting technology is out there? We know that there are research studies about using such technology to examine X-rays to diagnose lung cancer, for instance. I would be interested to hear about something positive as we look at helping our NHS to address waiting times and so on.