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Yes, thank you.

All that is very interesting, but it is not quite what I understood to be happening. I am also interested to hear that work on long Covid is still in its early stages.

In 2019, Auditor General, your predecessor pointed out that the Scottish Government’s commitment to recruit 800 GPs would be all but undone by people leaving the profession. Is there enough focus on retention? Do we need to see more ambition if we are going to get a grip on workforce planning?

I note the work that we are doing and the reasons that we are doing it, but we are not doing enough on pensions. The current NHS pension scheme is hindering NHS consultants from doing extra work, because essentially, they are having to pay to go to work. We also need—and I would love it if we could do that in the committee—to have an employers’ contribution recycling scheme, as we have in Wales, to enable consultants to do more work. I would like to see more work being done on that and for the committee to write to the cabinet secretary about that.

I note that councils will be granted about £10,000 to look after the health needs of each person who comes from Ukraine. Is that money being used in the regulations and is it ring fenced to help people from Ukraine to address their healthcare needs?

I will pick up on Evelyn Tweed’s question about how the NHS in Scotland was not financially sustainable before the pandemic. I have two questions.

First, what steps could we take to make the health service more efficient?

Secondly, what work have you done, or seen, on silos and pots of money? I can give an example. A department might have one pot of money to employ locums and another pot of money for its current staff. Money cannot cross from one pot to the other, so current staff are not paid what locums are paid and therefore do not do internal locum work.

I wanted to come on to that. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to know what you need and what you have to do if there is a lack of data. Are we seeing progress, or a lack of progress, in relation to data collection and analysis? What gaps are there, and how do we fill them?

Cabinet secretary, as you have just said, data is vital. However, as a GP, I cannot see what my psychiatric colleagues have written, and when I was doing my psychiatric block, I could not see what the child and adolescent mental health services doctors had written, even though I was covering for CAMHS overnight. We have patients who have to tell their story and repeat it. There are occasions on which, although we have the key information summary service, the out-of-hours provider is unable to see what I have written, and vice versa.

All in all, the sharing of information in a patient’s journey is not currently adequate, which is a real safety concern. What can we do quickly to try to solve that? Secondly, when there is data sharing, what are the data protection implications that arise?

Incentives such as golden hellos are important in encouraging people to go to such areas, but we have heard that there are significant differences in the pay of our colleagues, depending on where they work. We were told in evidence that sometimes such workers are band 3 and sometimes they are band 4, which makes a huge difference to the amount that they make.

There is no point in incentivising someone to take a job in a particular area if they will make significantly less money, so should we standardise the level that our allied health professionals start on and then add on incentives to get people into those rural areas that are harder to recruit to?

We have touched on the issue of inequality being not just about wealth, with rurality causing an inherent inequality. It is clear that staffing issues are not evenly distributed around the country. Earlier, you extolled link workers and spoke about how good they are. I love my link worker and think that they are brilliant. However, link workers are not available to people in areas such as Forth valley or Aberdeenshire. At the heart of ensuring that we have equality, we must ensure that the staff who are available in Glasgow or Edinburgh are available throughout the country.

Therefore, how will you ensure that areas that are hard to recruit to and which do not have staff will get the staff, and that that process will be rolled out in a manner that means that such an approach will be at the heart of recruitment strategies?

My question goes back to one of the things that you said about pensions. In Wales, they have solved the issue of doctors paying to go to work through pensions by recycling of employers contributions. That allows the doctors who are in danger of paying to go to work to come out of the scheme. It is a fairly good solution, and it also brings in more tax because the money is taxed. My question is why we have not gone down that route more quickly, because it seems to be working in another devolved nation.

Cabinet secretary, behavioural change is very important—of course it is—but I will give you two examples of the issue here. When I was at Yorkhill children’s hospital, people were smoking by a big sign with a picture of a sick child on it that said, “Please don’t smoke here—it drifts up to my window”.

Forth Valley royal hospital has done more than I have seen other hospitals do. When I was there, it had big signs everywhere, and there was cross-hatching on the floor that said, “Do not smoke here”. The hospital employed somebody who went round telling people not to smoke there. He tried to take details and issue fines, which was the right thing for him to do. He is a lovely guy, but people just abused and ignored him, as they ignore the other measures. If someone is standing in front of a picture of a sick kid and smoking, it will be really difficult to effect behavioural change.

Initially, like the indoor smoking ban, the measure needs to be policed, and it needs to be policed with teeth. I am picking up that point from Paul O’Kane as well. We need to police that really well, particularly at the start, in order to kick-start behavioural change. Will you look at that again to see what we can do to really clamp down in those initial phases?