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: 20 February 2024
Emma Harper
In May 2023, the Government published its plan, “Self-Directed Support Improvement Plan 2023-27”. One of the chapters is entitled “What is different about this Plan” and another is entitled “How will we know the Plan is working?” I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the Government committing to doing an annual report to look at what has been taken forward, because there are a lot of extremely complex areas when it comes to SDS. An idea that I had was that SDS could be embedded in the education of social care workers.
What are your thoughts on the improvement plan? How can we measure how successful we have been in addressing the complexities of care, whether people are at home, in the community or in a community hospital?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 February 2024
Emma Harper
Do you think that the lack of uptake of option 1 might be because information on it is not provided? Does wider information need to be put out about the four options and how people can make their personal choice in order to decide for themselves and have more empowerment and control? I will look at the details of the age information. It looks like people between zero and 17 have a higher uptake of option 1 and people between 65 and 75 choose option 3. It might be about how the options are sold to people.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 20 February 2024
Emma Harper
Good morning. From quickly looking at the data on people choosing option 1 to option 4, it looks like option 1, which involves a person being an employer and having someone coming and supporting them with care, is chosen least. Option 3 is basically a mixture of choices from option 1 through to option 4. In our papers, there are issues relating to stress that might be caused by being an employer. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on that. I will go to Julia Smith first. Option 1 seems to be chosen least, and it looks like option 3 involves the local authority choosing. Is there stress associated with having a personal assistant?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Emma Harper
Good morning. I want to pick up on what Dr Pete Cheema said about education being the way forward. I have been looking at the work of Henry Dimbleby and Chris van Tulleken on the problems that are caused by ultra-processed foods and how education is not the only answer, because we need to tackle stigma and to support people to lose weight.
In relation to alcohol dependence, what opportunities are there for supermarkets—I am thinking of the big ones that are not here today—to change their model of selling to one that is similar to what goes on in Ireland, for instance, where there are shop-inside-the-shop off-licences? Would that give us an opportunity to look at how we support people?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Emma Harper
Has the pandemic affected our ability to capture further evidence? It obviously informed the way in which some evidence was gathered. As Justina Murray described, there were higher levels of drinking during the pandemic. Do we need to continue with minimum unit pricing in order to get further robust evidence? I see that Alison Douglas has her hand up.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Emma Harper
Thank you.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Emma Harper
Good morning, everybody. Over the weekend, I was reading about minimum unit pricing policies that have been implemented in other European countries. I declare an interest as a registered nurse and former liver transplant nurse. Other countries are adopting MUP in some form or another. Other European countries have some form of taxation on alcohol, anyway. There is a report called “No place for cheap alcohol: the potential value of minimum pricing for protecting lives”. I would be interested to hear about what we can learn from other countries. The impact of the pandemic would then be a second question.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Emma Harper
The issue is not just one of education. For example, we had to introduce laws on the wearing of seat belts in cars in order to get people to wear them. Should regulation not be part of the process of tackling alcohol harm in Scotland?
11:15Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 6 February 2024
Emma Harper
My question is about your thoughts on alcohol advertising. I read an article in The Lancet that basically said that one third of the people on the planet die because of fossil fuels, alcohol, ultra-highly processed food and tobacco. What needs to happen with advertising to reduce the harm from alcohol?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 16 January 2024
Emma Harper
I am going to declare an interest, too, as a registered nurse. I worked with physician assistants and what are now physician associates when I worked in a level 1 trauma centre in California, including in anaesthesia. Therefore, I have been interested in following this debate and, indeed, have looked at the American perspective. In May 2021, the House of Delegates passed a resolution to formally name physician associates as associates. I know that there are issues and concerns that the training of physician associates or anaesthesia associates might impede the ability of junior doctors to find time for their training. Has that been considered so that we can allay concerns that it might impact the training of our junior doctors?