 Ok, as colleagues will be aware, the next item of business is a statement by Humza Yousaf on health and care recovery in winter planning. The cabinet secretary will take questions on his statement, and therefore there should be no interruptions or interruptions. I call on his position. The cabinet secretary, around ten minutes please. I welcome the opportunity to provide an update to Parliament on the continued recovery the NHS from the Covid-19 pandemic and to set out our resilience plans for this coming winter. This past year has been immensely challenging for our workforce who have nevertheless continued to deliver excellent services in the face of multiple waves of Covid-19, in the face of increased demand and the most difficult winter period yet experience. This year we potentially face an even more challenging winter, which is made more difficult by the escalating cost of living crisis and economic mismanagement by the UK Government. Our NHS recovery plan and the specific measures that we are taking to ensure resilience this winter represent system-wide solutions to those system-wide challenges. Resilience and recovery go hand in hand. We have been spending months planning for this winter ahead and let me firstly turn to our recovery plan update. Our resilience plan for winter and beyond are made possible by the commitment that we have made to invest and reform our NHS. Our plan commits to £1 billion of targeted funding during the lifetime of this Parliament to increase NHS capacity to deliver reform and support timely access to treatment. We know that the NHS will not recover in weeks or even, frankly, months. It will take years. We will always be clear and we will always be upfront and honest about the scale of the challenge that we collectively face. It is therefore critical that we reform our services as national circumstances evolve. We are committed to maintaining a health and social care system that is resilient and adaptable. We all owe that workforce and health and social care a huge debt of gratitude. There can be no recovery without continued investment in our workforce. The NHS recovery plan commits to growing our workforce and we have invested in our staff through fair pay, through increased training, up-skilling opportunities and widening access to career opportunities. By April of this year, we recruited more than 1,000 additional healthcare support staff and almost 200 registered nurses from overseas to help to address the unprecedented challenges that are facing our services. Staffing levels have increased by over 2,800 permanent whole-time equivalent roles in the last year. That builds on our strong track record of delivering 10 consecutive years of growth. There are almost 25,000 additional whole-time equivalent staff working in NHS Scotland compared with a decade ago. Indeed, staffing in NHS Scotland remains at historically high levels. At general practice is, of course, the bedrock of the NHS and I recognise the pressures that are faced by our practices. To that end, we have expanded community multidisciplinary teams right across the country. Recruiting over 3,220 primary care multidisciplinary team members have increased funding for those teams to £170 million this year, which will be the minimum funding position for future years. That helps patients to access a range of expert advice from a wider team of healthcare professionals working alongside and supporting GPs and their practice teams. Furthermore, we are making good progress on increasing the number of GPs in Scotland by 800 by the end of 2027. The progress in the recovery and reform of planned care in the last year, of course, has been impacted by the need to respond to various waves of Covid-19. Despite that, we continue to make progress. In fact, statistics out just today show that, in August of this year, 21,218 operations were performed. That is a 19 per cent increase to the month before and the highest monthly total since the pandemic began. Over the last 18 months, we have opened the NHS Golden Jubilee Eye Centre, procured Carrick Glen Clinic in Ayrshire and Arran to become the Air National Treatment Centre. We have opened a mobile operating theatre to enable almost 350 elective surgeries for patients in Orkney and Shetland, and we have opened a urology hub at 4th Valley Royal Hospital. In addition, significant progress has been made on the national treatment centre programme. Fife and 4th Valley national treatment centre is a plan to open in early 2023, followed by Highland and the Golden Jubilee phase 2. Work to recruit staff on those facilities is very much under way. We are committed to reducing those long waits. We know that longer somebody has to wait for an operation, the greater the chance of deterioration and deconditioning. Public Health Scotland data shows that, by the end of August this year, 75 per cent of outpatient specialities had zero or fewer than 10 patients waiting more than two years, and 10 out of 14 territorial health boards had five patients or fewer waiting more than two years. Between June and August of this year, significant progress was made in several specialisms in eradicating long outpatient waits, including reductions of 48 per cent in general surgery, 74 per cent in plastic surgery and 96 per cent in cardiology. I thank all NHS staff for their phenomenal work to help to tackle those long waits. Of course, the continued theme of this statement is that there is still work to do. In terms of urgent care, Presiding Officer, A&E performance is not where I nor indeed this Government wants it to be. Too many people are waiting far too long for urgent care and treatment. Our A&E departments are working under significant pressure. As with health services across the rest of the UK, the pandemic continues to seriously affect those services. We are determined to improve and stabilise performance working closely with boards on measures to reduce pressures on our acute sites. However, as winter arrives, those pressures will undoubtedly have a detrimental impact on already stretched services, but we will do what we can to mitigate the worst effects of those. The update on the recovery of the NHS is by its nature a snapshot of a larger, longer and more complex picture of the course of this Parliament. We will invest more than £70 billion in the delivery of health and social care services. The NHS recovery update demonstrates a clear plan to support health and social care. I was interested to note the recent plan for patients that was announced by the UK health secretary. It very much resembles work that is already being done here in NHS Scotland. Our recovery plan, which was first published in August last year, includes a commitment to increase NHS capacity by at least 10 per cent as quickly as possible to help address backlogs. It is committed to scaling up the use of technology and the use of NHS near me. There was a commitment to ensure that all of Scotland's general practices had support from pharmacy and nursing practice in the same plan. Those are just a few of the policies already being delivered in Scotland that were subsequently announced by the UK Government. We will continue to work tirelessly to deliver those ambitions set out in the recovery plan and will provide the next progress update in a year's time. Between now and then, of course, winter comes. To help us to mitigate the challenges that winter will undoubtedly bring, we are investing £600 million in total to support services over what we expect to be an extremely challenging season indeed. We know that if Covid transmission rises in our community, then there are significant impacts on our health and social care services. That is why our winter vaccination programme is very much under way. More than 2 million people in Scotland will be offered Covid-19 and flu vaccines by the holiday season, helping to protect the public in relieving pressure on the NHS. We have been working for several months with NHS Scotland chief executives, with directors of planning, executive leads for resilience, to plan for the significant pressures that we fully expect this winter to bring. Our winter resilience overview that we have published today and containing priorities that have been agreed with our partners in COSLA, builds on our response to last winter and involves Government at both national and local level with delivery partners right across the system. We are working with the BMA and Royal College of General Practitioners to increase accessibility to primary care and make sure that appointments can be made with the most appropriate person, be it the GP, the physio, the pharmacist or any other appropriate member of the multidisciplinary team, who can help them throughout the course of this winter. This winter, we want to see improved call waiting times at NHS 24 and improved patient outcomes too. We will be using a suite of tools, including the NHS 24 app, to support people across Scotland. Our winter resilience overview focuses on the recruitment, retention and wellbeing of health and social care workforce, with the aim of expanding supporting our workforce over the course of this winter period. To boost our NHS workforce, which has already grown by almost nine per cent since December 2019, this winter we are making £8 million available to support boards in recruiting up to 750 additional nurses, midwives and allied health professionals from overseas. In addition, NHS boards have identified that they will recruit an additional 250 banned boards across the system over the coming months. This investment, allowing for significant recruitment of 1,000 additional staff over the course of winter, will be a welcome boost to our workforce in health boards up and down the country. The offer of paid, part-time work to health and social care students and additional measures designed to support opportunities for volunteering across the NHS are also contained in our plan. As well as recruitment, we are also supporting the retention of our existing workforce through new retire and return guidelines and by devolving power to NHS boards to utilise local flexibilities within NHS pension arrangements. Of the £528 million allocated to health and social care partnerships for winter funding, £200 million has been set aside to increase hourly rate of pay for those working in social care to £10.50. We are investing £45 million for the Scottish Ambulance Service this year to support recruitment and service development, and that includes plans for winter as well. We have managed to avoid 45,000 hospital bed days this year through expanding our virtual capacity and will continue to invest in our hospital at home. The coming months will be another test for our health and social care systems and the incredible workforce therein. I wish I could stand here and tell you and the chamber that we will be able to mitigate every single challenge this winter will throw at us. However, recovery is a process, and I have always been up front in saying that this recovery journey we are on will take years, not weeks or indeed a few months. I hope that our winter plan set out the measures that we will take to bolster the workforce to reduce demand by treating people at home or as close to home as possible during this difficult period. I wish to end where I started, and that is by thanking our incredible NHS and social care staff for all their unbelievable efforts across the course of this pandemic. There can be no recovery if we do not take care of your wellbeing, which is this Government's top priority. Thank you, cabinet secretary. The cabinet secretary will now take questions on the issues raised in his statement and tend to allow around 20 minutes, after which we will need to move on to the next item of business. Members who have not already done so, but wish to ask a question, so you press the request speak buttons now or as soon as possible. I call First Lady Tess White. Presiding Officer, I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of his statement. All of us in the chamber pay tribute to the outstanding work of the health and social care workers across Scotland, but the reality is that they have been badly let down by this SNP Green Government. The NHS recovery plan was published more than a year ago, but things seem to have gone from bad to worse. Only today we heard that August's A&E waiting times were the worst on record across every category. There are already reports of ambulances stacking up outside emergency departments, often for hours, including Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in my own area, and that's well before the winter months arrive. The system isn't just stretched, it's overstretched. A few people apart from the SNP benches will be reassured by the cabinet secretary's statement today. So let me put three questions to the cabinet secretary. Firstly, his statement mentions improved call wait times at NHS 24. Given that one patient waited two hours, eight minutes, and 15 seconds in June to be answered by an operator, can the cabinet secretary tell us how this will be achieved and what he considers an acceptable waiting time? Secondly, there's no mention in the statement of NHS dentistry, which is at breaking point. Does the health secretary realise the catastrophic impact his funding cuts will have on the dentistry sector? And finally, third question is the statement mentions growing the NHS workforce through recruitment, but almost nothing about retention. Nursing vacancies are up by as much as 25% compared with last year. So what is the Scottish Government doing to improve retention of NHS workers? Before I call the cabinet secretary, can I just advise the chamber that there's a lot of interest in asking questions? So the questions are going to have to be more succinct or keeping to time, and so too are the responses, cabinet secretary. Taking that cue, of course, I'm happy to follow up if the members feel that there's anything that is missing from any of the answers in terms of the overall deterioration of certain aspects of care provided. She's right to mention that any figures are not where we want them to be in the monthly figures for August that came out. It's 66.1 per cent here in Scotland and England, 55.8 per cent. So we continue to be the best performing. That is called comfort. I accept to people who are waiting far too long, but that is to provide that important context that this is a problem that is faced by health services right across the UK, in fact, by many health services right across the world. The example that Tess White has given around a patient waiting for as long as she outlined is simply not good enough. I would say that I would expect that to be the exception. In fact, I know it to be the exception because we know what median call times are. How we will support that is through additional recruitment. I was pleased to be at the DUMD hub for NHS 24, where we have an exceptional work force recruited there to bolster NHS 24's capability and capacity, so I can write to Tess White in more detail around what we're planning to do with NHS 24. In terms of additional funding for dentistry, as in our plan, I can only give a small snapshot of what is in our overall plans for dentistry, we are continuing that bridging payment between now and the end of the financial year. That bridging payment will be 20 per cent on top of fees that are currently paid and then go to 10 per cent as well. Again, I can write to Tess White in more detail about the significant impact that that has had on increasing NHS dental examinations in the last quarter, quite a significant impact indeed, which I'm very pleased about. The last point that I make on retention, which is her third question, is again, if she looks at the detail of the plan in some of this island in my statement, she's absolutely right that retention has to be a key plank. One will invest in the workforce in terms of their wellbeing, because that helps with retention. Secondly, we've allowed some levels of flexibility around pensions, which is something that the BMA has been calling for, to help with medical staff, a rec scheme recycling of employers' contribution scheme, so we'll devolve that power to boards and I think that other members have called for that. The third point about retention, which again I'm happy to provide to Tess White with more detail offline, is about our retire and return policy, which is a direct result of a meeting that a number of us, including Craig Hoy, Jackie Baillie and Alex Cole-Hamilton, were at with the RCN, where a number of members told us that it had to be a better return, retire and return policy, and we've implemented that. I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of his statement and associate myself with his remarks to thank our NHS staff. In the 500 days that he's been in charge, things have got worse, and there is little recognition of the scope of the challenge in this new plan. Nurses are balloting for strike action. There are 7,500 vacancies across the NHS, a staggering increase of 169 per cent since the SNP came to power. Staff tell me that patients are at risk because wards are short staff, one nurse to 30 patients in some wards, and now we have as many as 50 per cent of junior doctors thinking about leaving. Staff are the backbone of our NHS, so this amounts to a catastrophe on the cabinet secretary's watch. What action will he take? How many more nurses and doctors can we expect for this winter? All the medical experts—the RCN, the BMA, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine—have been telling the cabinet secretary time and time again that he should invest in tackling delayed discharge to deal with the long-waited A&E, but under his watch we have lost 740,000 bed days. Finally, does the cabinet secretary not understand that he could lose the confidence of the medical profession in the face of a long and difficult winter ahead? Does he not agree that he will have failed if the measures that he has outlined today do not reduce delayed discharge, do not tackle A&E waiting times and do not stop staff leaving? To Jackie Baillie, she does a disservice to the health service if she does not recognise some of the recovery that has been made by our incredibly hard-working NHS staff. For example, I have just mentioned statistics today, showing that planned operations have increased from July to August of this year by 19 per cent to the highest level since the pandemic. There is a balanced picture here, but of course things are challenging. I do not think that anybody can deny that. I am certainly not denying that. I have said many times in the chamber that urgent care performance is not where we need it to be. Delayed discharge is absolutely right. It is nowhere near where we want it to be. It is not through a lack of effort. I am happy to provide detail to Jackie Baillie and the conversations that we have had with health and social care partnerships up and down the country on how we resolve some of the issue. We know that there are a number of factors, including some external factors, not within the control of this Government that have made staffing in care homes and care at home more difficult. Brexit being one example, a very difficult recruitment market being another example too, but that is not to say that we are not working day and night to try to resolve some of those issues. If I could pick up on some of the questions that Jackie Baillie asked more directly on nurses' balloting for strike, that gives me great concern. I have been speaking to the RCN to Unison and other trade unions very regularly. We are looking to get back around the table with them this month to recommence those discussions and negotiations and give them an improved pay offer because they have a very strong mandate from their members to reject the last pay offer that we have provided to them. In terms of staff recruitment, I would have hoped that she would have listened to what I said in my statement and, hopefully, read what is in the plan. That is a clear central plank as part of our plan. I am not sure why she is shaking her head because it says in that plan that there are 750 overseas nurses, midwives and indeed AHPs as well. If she wants to break down of how many will be nurses, I will let her know and how many will be midwives and how many will be AHPs. I am happy to give that detail offline. On top of that, there will be 250 band 4s as well. Will that mean that there will still be vacancies? Of course, and we will do our best to try to reduce those vacancies, but the member should be left in no doubt at all that staffing is at historically high levels under this Government. In fact, it is 6 per cent up since the onset of the pandemic, which includes over 550 qualified nurses and midwives since we published the recovery plan as well. In terms of delayed discharge, I have referenced that already. What I would say is that that is why it is so crucial that we continue to invest in hospital at home, because one of those pathways, the Opat pathway, has a loan managed to save 45,000 bed days in the last year alone. We are almost halfway through the time, and we have just finished the front benches. I am going to protect backbencher's opportunity to ask questions, so we are going to prolong this session ever so slightly. I am going to call Gillian Martin, followed by Finlay Carson, but that is not an invitation to extend the questions and the responses. Gillian Martin noted, patient flow through hospital particular is going to be really important as always is, but particularly through the winter months, what steps are being taken to ensure effective system flow, particularly in health boards with large rural areas? In short, there have been really good discussions, particularly with some of our health boards in rural areas around what we can do to bolster the hospital at home service, because ultimately although flow is absolutely an issue and a problem, the more people we can treat closer to home, the better. It is better for those patients often who will have to travel long distances to get to acute sites to be treated at home or as close to home as possible. Our hospital at home teams are working hard within particularly rural health boards to try to make sure that that is a good service being provided. I got to see a good example of hospital at home. In the western isles, for example, and how in a very remote island community they will be able to deliver that service in a very effective way indeed. What we will also continue to do is invest in staff in rural health boards, so the staffing that I referenced there to my answer to Jackie Baillie, of course we would expect a proportion of that staffing to go into rural health boards, but also incentivise particular cohorts of staff to work in rural health boards as well, so that again helps with keeping people out of hospitals. In terms of actually helping with the flow of hospitals, I want her to be absolutely assured that the work that we are doing in and around delayed discharge has a focus on rural, remote and island community health boards too. Across the country, a lack of access to cottage hospitals is undermining the recovery, including in my area of Galway and Western Feast. Cottage hospitals are vital to tackling the endemic problem of delayed discharge, which is an icon impact throughout the whole healthcare system, particularly in A&E. In my area, three hospitals have effectively been mothballed since early 2020. Could Cwbly, Newton, Stewart and Castle Douglas have the capacity of over 36 beds? What action will the cabinet secretary now take to reopen or provide new fit-for-purpose facilities to provide services that cottage hospitals so effectively delivered in the past, including palliative and step-down care to create pressures? That is a really good and important question by Finlay Carson. I hope that he appreciates and I think that he does that really difficult decisions were made in the course of the pandemic where we needed staff and acute sites are exceptionally busy. He is right, and other members have been right to push me around cottage hospitals and their local health board about is there the ability to reopen them, for example, to take delayed discharge or patients that we could transfer from acute to perhaps step down care or step down facilities. Our challenge really then is staffing, but it is an issue that I will look at in context of Dumfries and Galloway. I will look at the three cottage hospitals that he references, but I can promise you that these conversations and these possibilities about reopening cottage hospitals are very much in our plans and being explored. David Torrance, to be followed by Paul O'Kane. Individuals who are unable to heat their homes, unable to have regular food at regular times will be susceptible to greater illness and will place a greater strain on the health and social care services over winter. Can I ask the cabinet secretary what additional impact will increase in the cost of living crisis that is on the demand for NHS and social care services over winter? I can be brief and saying that my views on this are well known. The cost crisis is, in my view, a public health crisis. It is part of our winter planning. We are planning for that eventuality of that cost crisis worsening and therefore the impacts of people's public health is part of our planning at the moment. What I would do is appeal to the chancellor not to take his hatchet to our public services, as he is threatening to do in order to mitigate the impacts of his own economic mismanagement, because that will have a devastating impact on already very stretched budgets. However, I can give David Torrance an assurance that the cost crisis and the impacts of that are very much factored into our winter planning. Paul O'Kane, to be followed by Stephanie Callaghan. Last week it was reported that several patients have suffered cardiac arrests in the past month while waiting to be seen at A&E in the Queen Elizabeth University hospital. Tragily, two of those cardiac arrests were fatal and followed significant delays in being triaged. That followed reports last week that winter surge beds were already almost at capacity, with John Paul Lockry, vice-president of the RCEM Scotland, stating that the NHS urgently needs extra resources to cope. It is only October and our NHS is on life support. What is the cabinet secretary going to do when he is going to bring forward a detailed plan on A&E to provide it with sufficient staffing, capacity and resources, to deal with the already overstretched demand, not only in terms of delayed discharge but also in terms of triage? I would invite Paul O'Kane to look at the plans that have been published both the update and also the winter resilience plan. Staffing is a key plank of that plan, and that staffing, hopefully, will help in the relation to triaging. On the cases that he references, I will not comment on individual cases, I will tend to express my deepest sympathy to those people and their families that have been affected by long waits, but he is not going to get an argument for me that there are detrimental impacts to people who have to wait, whether it is for elective surgery or urgent treatment, so I can guarantee him that my focus, and this Government's focus, is doing everything that we possibly can to bolster our NHS through this very difficult winter. At A&E, the key to that will have to be trying to create capacity, so we will do everything in our power to try to reduce those delayed discharges. At the other end in the front door, we will do our best to try to reduce demand, and that is why the investment hospital at home, the investment in social care, and so on and so forth that I have detailed will be important to that end. Throughout the pandemic, our NHS and social care staff have shown extraordinary commitment working under immense pressure to support people. Now these same staff face increased loving costs and energy prices. What steps have been taken to support employees in both the NHS and social care over the winter months? That is a really important point by Stephanie Callaghan, so she will know that our NHS and social care staff—our NHS staff, forgive me, our gender for change staff—are the best paid anywhere in the UK. We want to retain that position. We are in the midst of—she knows—pay negotiations, but it is my intention—I have every intention—of maintaining that position that we have the best paid NHS staff, because that ultimately will make the difference in terms of the cost crisis that they are facing and that is affecting them as well. Well-being initiatives will be important as well. We have done a significant amount on wellbeing from what would be described as relatively minor interventions, but I think that we are well appreciated, such as hot food and drinks on a busy ward right the way through to perhaps seen as more significant interventions such as psychological therapies and counselling being available for staff. We will do that as well, but ultimately the economic levers around the cost crisis lie with the UK Government, so if they can stop fighting with each other and get round the table and hopefully bring forward the package that deals with this cost crisis, that would be to the benefit of NHS and social care workers up and down the country. Alex Cole-Hamilton, to be followed by Gillian Mackay. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. It is astonishing to me that it was a full 10 minutes before the cabinet secretary acknowledged that there was any kind of problem in the NHS, and so much of that problem relates to staffing. It has been staring his Government in the face for years. Last week, a whistleblower told me that the Edinburgh royal infirmary operates routinely with 80 fewer nurses than it needs on every single shift. Just moments ago, the BMA released research showing that half of junior doctors are thinking of leaving the profession altogether, demoralised, undervalued, exhausted. Will the cabinet secretary take this opportunity to offer the health and care workers who he rightly thanks a profound apology for the failures of this Government? I will say to Alex Cole-Hamilton that, in my conversations with health and social care workers, I give them a commitment and a promise that this Government is singularly focused on trying to improve their wellbeing so that they can care for the people and the public that we represent. That is what I will do. That is what I am focused on. That is why we have historically high levels of staffing. That is why we have the best-paid staff anywhere in the UK. If Alex Cole-Hamilton has any solutions, please come forward. All that was was a dire drive against the Government, which is not going to help NHS staff on the ground. I note from the cabinet secretary's statement that students are being employed part-time to add capacity. Will I recognise as a vital experience what structures are being put in place to support those students to ensure that they are not being overworked or put under undue pressure that may affect their studies? That is a very good question indeed, so there are limits on how much they can work so that it does not impact on their studies. I would say to Gilliam Mackay that, during the really difficult periods in the early days of the pandemic—and those difficult periods continue to this day—there was the ability to utilise students, particularly during December and January, when there was that natural lull and break from such intense studying. We are looking at exploring whether we can do something similar again, but in terms of students that we are able to offer placements to, which would be of great help. Let me thank those students in advance, because they always show great enthusiasm in helping out on the front line that there are safeguards in place to protect them so that their studies are not unduly affected. We have three more members who need to ask a question, so the questions are going to have to be brief and the answers are brief where Natalie Dillon is going to be followed by Alexander Burnett. Vaccination remains our best line of defence, and I am aware that Covid boosters are now being offered to priority groups, and everyone who is eligible can safely receive that vaccination and the flu vaccination at the same appointment. Can the minister provide an update on the roll-out of the winter vaccination programme and provide assurance that there are adequate vaccines to meet demands? Yes, I can be brief in saying that it is well underway, it is going exceptionally well. In fact, we have managed to track above our modelled expectation for this time of the programme, so the roll-out is going fantastically well, the uptake is exceptionally high, the co-administration rate is well above 90 per cent between flu and Covid-19 as well, because as much as we are focused on Covid, we expect—our clinicians tell me—that they expect a resurgence of flu this winter in the same way that we have seen through the southern hemisphere. Statistics and the latest data around how many vaccinations we have administered, and I think that this will be the same for other UK nations, will be published later this week. The cabinet secretary's centralising projects such as vaccination centres are actually causing more problems than they are solving by taking staff from community hospitals to centres over 40 miles from a patient that they were previously helping. We have mentioned a boy in community hospitals now closed. When will the cabinet secretary admit his winter resilience and Covid recovery plan not only fails to mention rural Scotland but also fails to offer it any flexibility at all? It is astonishing that he has criticised the Covid vaccination programme. Scotland has led the way in first, second and third doses of the vaccination—not only that—at one point during a previous winter vaccination programme. It was one of the fastest and most successful vaccination programmes in the entire world, and yet he is not able to congratulate the fantastic staff for the efforts that they have made. There are local flexibilities. Local communities can, for example, request GPs, for example, to be involved in their programme, and that is a decision that is then discussed and made in conjunction with officials in the Scottish Government. However, there are particular concerns that Alexander Burnett has. He is more than welcome to approach me and more than happy to try to be as flexible as possible, but so far from the data that I have seen and that, as I said to Natalie Donham, will be published shortly, so far the winter vaccination programme is going extremely well. Covid-19 still remains a threat to public health this winter. Can the cabinet secretary reiterate what action is being taken to mitigate against the risk of increased levels of Covid infection over the winter months? I can be brief by saying that the number one action that we can take, collectively as a society as well as here in government, is to make sure that people are being vaccinated. That vaccination programme, as I said, is well under way. Of course, we are continuing to work with Public Health Scotland to reiterate public health guidance as well, so I would remind people that the pandemic is not over, the virus has not gone away, and therefore, if they are able to have cognisance, be aware of and implement that strong public health guidance, you can help yourself and, indeed, help the people around you. That concludes the statement point of order, Jackie Baillie. I am sure that members across the chamber will have shared my concern at the resignation of Lady Poole from the Scottish Covid inquiry. I welcome the information provided by the Deputy First Minister on a cross-party basis. What he failed to mention is that there appear to have been other resignations of senior counsel from the inquiry. Can the Presiding Officer consider, with the bureau, a need for an urgent statement this week? I thank Jackie Baillie for the advance notice of her point of order. I think that the matter she raises is clearly of some significance, but it will be perhaps a matter for her business manager to raise with counterparts through the bureau. Thank you very much indeed. There will now be a brief pause before we move to the next item of business. Thank you. The next item of business is an announcement by the Finance and Public Administration Committee on report on the national performance framework ambitions into actions. I call on Daniel Johnson, deputy convener of the committee, to make the announcement. Mr Johnson. Yesterday, the Finance and Public Administration Committee published its report on how the national performance framework is working in practice. The NPF is the national framework to which all public services in Scotland should be aligned, reflecting broad national strategic goals. Those national outcomes cut across all policy areas and are relevant to the remits of almost all parliamentary committees. Indeed, the revised national outcomes will be scrutinised by all committees as part of the Scottish Government's required consultation process over the coming year, and we intend our report to serve as context to this process. What we learned during our inquiry was that, whilst the NPF remains important in terms of articulating vision, there needs to be more sustained progress in terms of its use in implementing policy, measuring policy outcomes and informing government activity. In particular, the NPF must be seen to be used to inform financial decision making and as a measure of financial accountability to a much greater degree. The committee is convinced that visibility of the NPF must be increased, and we urge all parliamentary committees to engage with it and consider how they can use the national performance framework to scrutinise and understand government spending, decisions and policy. I commend this report to Parliament, and the committee looks forward to working with members and other committees as we scrutinise the forthcoming revised national outcomes. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. Thank you, Mr Johnson. It is now time to move on to the next item of business. The next item of business is decision time. In fact, there are no items that fall to be considered at decision time, and that concludes decision time. There will be a short pause before we move on to the final item of business, which is the member's debate. Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer.