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That is a really good question. On the gaps or barriers that we see at the moment relating to the sharing of data, work to remove those barriers is already taking place. That does not need another strategy or document necessarily. The issues are well known, we have been working on them for many years and we will continue to try to work through some of them.

If you look at our digital health and care strategy—I was looking at it again this morning—you will see that it has three key aims, the second of which is around the sharing of data and having a system that allows

“staff to record, access and share relevant information across the health and care system”.

It is really important that that is done in a way that not only removes the barriers but does so—I will speak frankly—within the financial constraints that we are under.

I highlight page 18 of the strategy, which talks about our digital foundation, the national digital platform and the importance of the cloud-based infrastructure. The strategy is not about upending every IT system across the NHS and social care and replacing it in its entirety with one system; it is about using cloud-based architecture, which can allow you to share information better.

The new data strategy will be an overarching strategy. It will talk about how important it is for people to be able to access their own data, how that data will be safely and ethically managed, safely stored and so on. It will also be an iterative strategy, so it will continue to be developed. It will not delay any of the current work that is being done to address the issue of the availability of data, whether at primary care, secondary care or community level.

The question about the recovery plan is fair. It is purposely a five-year recovery plan. We will, of course, update Parliament yearly, as the plan says; that update will happen when Parliament returns from the summer recess, which will be a year since the plan was published.

Ms Webber, and I suspect everybody around the table, would accept that we are not out of the pandemic yet. Not only are we not out of it, but the most recent wave of the pandemic that we dealt with has been the most challenging wave—it has been relentless. In relation to the alpha and delta waves of the pandemic—the early variants of Covid—we knew that a wave would hit us really hard for two to three months, after which we would hope to get out the other side and try to recover, but we have had wave after wave after wave.

The omicron wave hit us around December, then omicron seamlessly transitioned into BA.2, which was an even more transmissible variant of a sub-lineage of omicron, and we exited that wave only recently. That wave lasted for four or five months during the height of winter pressures. It was not its severity—it was less severe than previous variants—but its transmissibility that was the issue. That wave knocked out entire wards, including orthopaedic wards, in hospitals across the country, so there is no doubt that recovery has been hampered.

The foundations of the recovery plan are solid—for example, we are doing work with the centre for sustainable delivery to ensure that we drive innovation, and we are working on our national treatment centres. We hope to have a number of NTCs on board in the next 18 months. I recently announced the purchase of Carrick Glen hospital, which will not come on board during those 18 months, but it will be a crucial national treatment centre when it opens.

When we have lulls in pressure, the NHS has been able to recover to some degree. For example—John Burns will correct me if am wrong—the last monthly statistics that were published showed around a 17 per cent increase in the number of performed operations. The NHS is able to recover. However, I will not lie: recovery will be difficult and tough, and the biggest threat by far to recovery is future variants of the virus.

Nonetheless, I think that our recovery plan will deliver. I suspect that that is why the other nations of the UK published similar recovery plans after ours. The recovery plans of the UK Government and the Welsh Government are not at all dissimilar to ours. Everybody recognises that things will not be fixed in a year but will take time.

We should learn from good practice across the UK, Europe and the world, when we can. There will absolutely be good practice and, when it is appropriate to replicate that in Scotland and we can do so, we will do so. I have a high degree of trust that our health board colleagues will be able to deal with, treat and provide care for people with long Covid in a way that suits their demographic and needs, particularly those in remote, rural and island areas.

No doubt the picture will evolve, and I will continue to keep Parliament updated. The use of technology will be important, but equally, I suspect that, as our understanding develops through research, our approach will also develop.

We have a good record on NHS staffing. We have grown the NHS workforce by more than 20,500 since September 2006. That is 10 consecutive years of growth. We have record levels of staffing across medical and dental consultants, nursing and midwifery, and allied health professional groups. We also have the best paid staff. Our record is therefore good.

On the flipside of that, there have been challenges around our workforce planning and projections, which can be difficult at any time and blown off-course when we are hit with a pandemic—there is no doubt about that. That is why the projections and data that we expect to receive from health boards this summer will be hugely important in ensuring that our workforce plans meet the future demands on our health service.

Gillian Russell is the director of the health workforce in the NHS, and she will be able to add more, if Mr O’Kane is happy with that.

I appreciate what Paul O’Kane is trying to do, but—

On your first comment, I will, of course, take any questions that the committee wishes to ask. If we can give you the detail today, we will do so. As always, I will provide further written detail if that is required.

As I said I my opening remarks, I thought that the Audit Scotland report on the NHS is a fair summary of the challenges and highlights the efforts that the Government has had to make during an extraordinary period. This period will be written about in our history books and learned about in our schools and modern studies classes until long after any of us are around. It has been extraordinary; I again commend all those who were involved for their extraordinary efforts.

You asked specifically about the care and wellbeing portfolio. It would be fair to say that work on that portfolio has been affected by the pandemic: there is no doubt about that. One of my key officials—in fact, a joint director of that portfolio—was working on the test and protect system for us. We had to move crucial resources away from various parts of Government in order to focus on the response to the pandemic.

The work is at the developmental stage. Officials are working to define the intended scope. There are a number of workstreams, which I will touch on. We are clear that the work of the care and wellbeing portfolio must be broader than just healthcare, and that how it interacts with other portfolios and other departments in Government will be crucial. The first meeting of the internal care and wellbeing portfolio board took place late last month.

Your question about sustainability is absolutely on the money. Prevention will be a key element of the care and wellbeing portfolio. The committee has often spoken about the importance of that agenda, which is a vital part of the recovery and renewal of the NHS and social care. The care and wellbeing portfolio will be critical to that and will help to make our services more sustainable. If we stop people going into our hospitals and acute sites, or if we can keep them there for as short a time as possible if they do have to go there, that will be to their benefit and will help to make our services more sustainable.

The portfolio’s approach is still being developed. It has three primary objectives: coherence, sustainability and improved outcomes. You asked about sustainability, which is one of the key objectives. As well as prevention, the care and wellbeing portfolio will also have a big focus on innovation and on developing infrastructure that can drive efficiency and productivity within our health and care systems.

That is an excellent question. I regularly speak about that issue with the chief executives and chairs of our health boards, who have real anxiety about it. For most of us, life feels as if it is back to normal. We can interact with our family, book a holiday or hold a 70th birthday party for our parents and have 100 people attend, if we want to do that. Life, for most of us, feels as if it is back to normal, but the health service is still under extraordinary pressure. I do not need to tell people in this room about that: you know it because you are close to it.

People whose lives have gone back to normal are asking why it does not feel as though their health service has got back to what it was like before the pandemic. There must be honesty. I am honest to the best of my ability; there must be honesty across the board that it will take not weeks or months, but years for our NHS to recover, because there have been two years of accumulating challenges.

I do not pretend that there were no challenges in the health service before—there were. However, issues have undoubtedly been unbelievably exacerbated by the pandemic, and not just in the health service, but in social care.

It is important for us to be up front and honest and to manage expectations, but also to be ambitious. We are ambitious, and our recovery plan is a demonstration of that ambition. From conversations that I have with my health board colleagues and integration authorities about social care, I know that they all want to be ambitious, but realistic, too.

There is a bit more work to be done—John Burns and I speak about this regularly—on cementing our delivery milestones on planned care in particular, because we know how long people have been waiting for some elective procedures. We will publish that work in due course. I hope that it will set a realistic but ambitious timescale for recovery. You are right that we must be up front and honest about the scale of the challenge and how people access their services.

The plan would be to have that data. It is a fair expectation for the patient and for GPs or those who work in our health and social care system to have.

We expect to publish data around clinical prioritisation in the late summer of this year. That is a new policy that has been put in place to ensure that the public—you gave the example of your patients—will be able to see how long they will have to wait. However, it will probably give a range as opposed to an exact date.

We are working closely with Public Health Scotland and boards to develop the infrastructure in order to collate and publish that data. It is an ambition of ours to have that available in a way that is easy to find and understand for both the patient and the healthcare professional.

It will be monitored, evaluated and reported, of course. The current plans are to receive updated projections from our local health boards. We will then publish the projections for our workforce in more detail. We will continue to make sure that the Parliament is regularly updated, and I am sure that those workforce plans will be regularly scrutinised by the committee, as well as, I suspect, Parliament as a whole. It is our ambition to be transparent and open about the process, and also about the challenges. I have just articulated some of those challenges to Mr Torrance, but I think that we should be up front that this is ambitious and it will be challenging.

Yes—evaluation will be a critical part of any funding that we give. That goes for any portfolio, but I am particularly keen that evaluation should be embedded with any of the funding related to long Covid, because it is a condition that we are still learning about. I can absolutely commit to there being evaluation but, if you will forgive me, I will take the exact timescales of the evaluation off the table and furnish you with more detail.

Evaluation of the funding of any model is critical, because we are learning about long Covid day by day and week by week. The strategic network will also have a role to play in that evaluation. Everybody in the network is important, but I think that Dr Gulhane will agree that the most important people are those with lived experience. For me, the feedback loop that we have with them will be crucial in any evaluation.