Official Report: search what was said in Parliament
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.
Searching by different views
The web version of the Official Report has three different views:
- Report: this is the whole Official Report for a particular meeting of a committee or Parliament
- Item of business: this is each individual agenda item in an Official Report. For example, Portfolio Questions would be the item of business in a Meeting of the Parliament report
- Contribution: this is each time someone has made a spoken contribution to a meeting.
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.
Search by MSP
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.
Searching by keyword
There are two types of keyword search:
- A keyword search without quotation marks will look for every instance of each word used and rank the results by frequency and proximity. It will also include variants of the keywords using “porter stemming”. This is when the search looks for the “stem” of a word regardless of its ending. So, for example, a search for [salmon farm] will return each instance of “salmon” and each instance of “farm” as well as potentially including results for “farms”, “farmed” and “farming”.
- A keyword search with quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase used. So, for example, a search for “salmon farm” in quotation marks will only return instances of that exact phrase.
Combining search filters
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.
More complex keyword searches
It’s also possible to run basic Boolean searches. For example:
- a search for “salmon farm” AND “Loch Lomond” will return only results which include both exact phrases
- a search for “salmon farm” NOT “Loch Lomond” will return results for “salmon farm” but exclude results which also include “Loch Lomond”
- a search for “salmon farm” OR “Loch Lomond” will return all results for “salmon farm” and all results for “Loch Lomond” regardless of whether they appear together
Searching by date
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:
- Current session (all Official Reports since the current sessions started)
- Last 6 months
- Last 12 months
- each of the previous sessions of Parliament. (Selecting the information icon above the “Select a time period” menu will give you the exact dates for each session.)
- All sessions
- You can also choose to select a custom date range, although adding a Start or End date will mean the search automatically defaults to this option.
If you search by an individual session, the list of 成人快手 and committees will automatically update to show only the 成人快手 and committees which were current during that session. For example, if you select Session 1 you will be show a list of 成人快手 and committees from Session 1.
If you add a custom date range which crosses more than one session of Parliament, the lists of 成人快手 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.
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Displaying 622 contributions
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Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 8 September 2021
Rhoda Grant
Thank you for allowing me to speak. The petition obviously follows a petition to your predecessor committee, and some of the new members on the committee might not be aware of the issue.
Basically, there are two treatments for essential tremor. Essential tremor is very disabling, because it makes people shake. It can affect things that we all take for granted, such as drinking and eating in public, and it can even affect the way that someone speaks. The people who suffer from it tend not to mix socially. It is a very difficult illness to deal with and it tends to have a very late diagnosis. Mary Ramsay, who is my constituent and the petitioner, was not diagnosed until her 40s.
Mary Ramsay has had brain surgery to deal with essential tremor. Brain surgery works and is a proven treatment, but the difficulty with it is that people need to go back and have the electrodes moved. People who have brain surgery for essential tremor have a lifetime of procedures ahead of them. Focused ultrasound is non-invasive鈥攖here is no brain surgery involved. It is a one-off treatment, and it is life changing for those who receive it.
In England, focused ultrasound is an approved treatment that NHS England funds. People from Scotland can be referred to NHS England for treatment, which seems totally crazy to me, because we have the machine in Dundee and we could be treating people here and now in Scotland, at a much lower cost.
Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee
Continued Petitions
Meeting date: 8 September 2021
Rhoda Grant
The petition is not from people in my constituency, but the committee will have seen that the Caithness health action team made a submission to the committee in support of it. Their concerns are similar to those of others in that people in that area have huge distances to travel to access medical treatment. Some funding is available, but it is not adequate and does not remove the financial disadvantage. There is also a social disadvantage for people with caring responsibilities鈥攆or example, children have to be looked after while they are away鈥攁ll of which creates huge problems for people. That is a consistent problem throughout the Highlands and Islands area that I represent and it has been an issue for me for all the time that I have been a member of the Scottish Parliament.
I understand that the training for medics, nurses and all those involved in healthcare is geared towards teamwork so that people can collaborate when working together to provide healthcare. In remote rural areas, however, we ask people to work very much on their own without any back-up and to depend on their own skills and knowledge, but the training does not equip people to do that.
11:15We also see that the NHS values specialisation. If a person specialises in a subject, their grading goes up, and that is true for doctors and nurses. However, at one point, I was speaking to nurses who work in the area that I cover who have a huge range of skills because they need to cope with anything that comes through the door and what is happening there and then, but they are on a basic banding. The breadth of their knowledge was not recognised; only the depth of their knowledge was recognised.
There are therefore huge disincentives for people who are generalists to become involved. One is from a training point of view, and the other is from a financial and career progression point of view. I therefore agree with the petitioners. We need an agency to take up the issue and work with it by looking at training and remuneration to make sure that we have health services in those remote and rural communities. It gets to the point where people are maybe not getting the health interventions that they need as quickly as they can, because it becomes very difficult for them. We do not need an A and E around every corner, but we do need to provide those kinds of services to people, without the same in-depth specialisms that there are elsewhere. People should have the same access to health services, regardless of where they live.
