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 1153 contributions
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Emma Harper
Because of my background in orthopaedic surgery and working in the operating room, I am curious about the flexibility of staff and the ability for them not to work in isolation. It is important that people know that we have the national treatment centres with the goal of challenging waiting lists for hip or knee replacements and ophthalmology, for instance.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Emma Harper
I am interested in digital care. We have Near Me. When I was reading my papers for the committee, I found out about Connect Me, which seems—so that people feel more connected, rather than feeling remote—to have evolved because of use of language that was remote. We have telehealth and telemedicine—all this telestuff—and now we have Connect Me, but none of my nursing colleagues has heard about Connect Me.
What work do you think needs to be done to help people to understand what Connect Me is all about? I understand that technology enabled care is beneficial, especially, as John Burns mentioned, in cases of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, through chronic respiratory early warning scoring—CREWS—in the community to keep folk out of hospital. I am very familiar with that, but I am interested in how we get info out to people about what digital solutions are out there.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 5 September 2023
Emma Harper
Technology enabled care in Scotland has a Twitter—or X—account, but folk in Dumfries and Galloway dinnae do Twitter, thank goodness; they do Facebook. Should we use different social media platforms to help to raise awareness about the work that the Scottish Government is doing on digital tech solutions, for instance?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 27 June 2023
Emma Harper
Good morning, cabinet secretary and everybody.
I want to pick up on health not being the only portfolio that needs to address the issues that we face in relation to population and so on. How is the Government working with other portfolios, including housing? I know that the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Land Reform and Islands is working with Paul McLennan, who is the Minister for Housing. Is the Scottish Government taking forward the necessary cross-portfolio engagement?
09:15Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 27 June 2023
Emma Harper
Thank you.
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 27 June 2023
Emma Harper
Thank you.
09:45Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 27 June 2023
Emma Harper
Community pharmacists are sometimes challenged in dispensing prescriptions because a pharmacist has to be on site. We now have vending machines, which work because of the way in which the regulations de-list part of the pharmacy to allow vending machines to be used for dispensing medicines. I think that the relevant regulations—those that allow medication to be dispensed if it is a repeat prescription for medication that has already been assessed for the patient—are reserved to Westminster. Is any work being done on how we can support pharmacists in that way so that community pharmacies can, for example, continue to dispense medications?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 27 June 2023
Emma Harper
I have a quick supplementary question about terms and conditions and about staffing. Nurses at bands 5 and 6 in Scotland are paid 6 per cent more than their counterparts in England, so we have seen nurses fae Carlisle relocate to Dumfries and Galloway. However, we have seen the opposite with the social care workforce—people who have trained in Dumfries and Galloway have then moved to England.
I am interested to know whether improving terms and conditions for social care staff is an aim in the development of the national care service, so that we can have equivalence in terms and conditions and retain our social care staff in Scotland. Right now it seems that staff are leaving Scotland to go to England because they can get improved salaries and terms and conditions.
09:30Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 27 June 2023
Emma Harper
I will be very brief. The Scottish graduate entry medicine programme is unique to Scotland and I am interested in hearing feedback about that. In addition, the Rural GP Association of Scotland has concerns about recruitment, retention and workload. How is the Government working with that association?
Health, Social Care and Sport Committee
Meeting date: 27 June 2023
Emma Harper
I should probably remind everybody that I am a former NHS Dumfries and Galloway employee and am still a registered nurse. I should have said that at the start.