 Heb i gwaith y flwyd cyffredinol cyfosbon hwn yn dechrau, ac mae cywyddiad y mai ar mwy o ran oedd y chwymru aill wedi gwybod y cempo. Rhyw gwrsfaith y ffainio mewn bralladau yn drwy ffrindidau a'r ffaith yng Nghymru yn ym Saudi Ffyrniadol 1861. Fyngi nhw Alex Cole-Hamilton yn ddiwaniatr hon, mae ffwrdd cymdeithasol a'r dweud. Fyngi nhw wedi ffwrdd i ni gweithio gyda'r styr. Rwy'n amdano'r ddweud o'i wneud i ni'n byw yng nghymru. i bendeyli, siarad Secondary, dr funkyfyn吉이� biography i beth negynthũghyn nododau fforddiau, a yna Will Sean Hamilton i digi'i llwy staffidau, yn song items yn du50? Rydw i'n swydd mwy bladderasio archifiddio gyd dim lwyddeirpydd, yn ei grwstopod i gwelytud r等rau i gyd i darparu y yr dewis i dynu hwnnw, drw mwyn o'r ffeydd pilw tua trawio. twfwyr arlaedd. It is disappointing that the discussion between the first time and the members to be on the first lead in the important subject in this chamber. I know that it will not be the last because this will occupy our attention rightly so for many years to come.者 many years to come, because, Deputy Presiding Officer, long Covid is accelerating. In October alone, 13,000 new patients were identified with this terrible and debilitating condition. Everybody in this chamber, everyone in our communities knows somebody who has had Covid and is still suffering from it many, many months later, and the effects can be brutal. In fact, it has been described as potentially the largest mass-disabling event since the First World War. It is not being overly dramatic to say, Presiding Officer, so poor has been the Government's response to long Covid in this country that sufferers in my constituency, in your constituency, would be better off moving to England given the care pathway that is available to sufferers of long Covid south of the border. That is why my motion calls on the Government to act in a meaningful way beyond the long Covid service and the small amounts of money that are already dedicated to the condition here, by bringing in long Covid clinics in every single health board in this country, by delineating a care pathway for sufferers to follow from the moment that they are identified into a range of interventions, whether that is aqua therapy and other forms of physio or other forms of support, but also the inclusion of dedicated nurses. I put that in the motion, Presiding Officer, because I did a lot of work before Covid with ME sufferers. I was horrified to learn that there was only one peripatetic ME nurse in the whole of the eastern seaboard in Scotland. Many of these sufferers are too ill to leave their homes for long periods of time, and it is incumbent on us to make sure that the resources are there to offer them care in their homes. I will take an intervention. I am very grateful to Alex Cole-Hamilton to give way. Does he agree with me that even though the very nature of long Covid is an increasing field of various symptoms and sufferings that individual had, if we had a pathway in Scotland, we could start to collect the evidence that would shorten the long-term need in respect of the services that those are constituents need? I am very grateful for the intervention. Martin Woodfield is absolutely right. We are, Presiding Officer, behind the curve in how we respond to this. It is a basket of conditions. I will come on to that in a second. People who suffer from long Covid experience a vast range of hundreds of symptoms, not altogether, some very differently, but they are include and not limited to breathing difficulties to the point of asphyxiation, chest pain, numbness, fatigue, tachycardia, diarrhea, neurological conditions and often in a relaxing and remitting pattern. The impact upon activities and daily living and the ability to work are huge. Martin Woodfield is absolutely right. Aside from physical side effects, long-term Covid sufferers are faced with issues ranging from trauma and to serious discrimination, which I will come on to again shortly. They report major difficulties in accessing primary or secondary care. Health practitioners who, despite being sympathetic, are unsure or unable to help due to a lack of treatment pathways, as we have discussed. Long Covid Scotland has reported cases of long Covid patients being wrongly prescribed medical information interventions, which exacerbate their conditions, such as graded exercise therapy. It was recently removed from the nice guidelines for conditions that are reported to have similar symptoms to long Covid, but it is still being issued as a therapy to long Covid sufferers. Make no mistake, that is not the fault of healthcare profession or professionals. If the Scottish Government refuses to acknowledge long Covid or the serious, debilitating nature of it as a condition, how can healthcare professionals be expected to offer sufferers the care that they deserve without the resources with which to do so? Long Covid patients are stuck in limbo while researching and advocating for themselves, although loved ones are their only lifeline and only source of hope in the face of this awful condition. I said earlier that physical symptoms are legion, but they are only half the story because there is a range of other things that long Covid patients have to deal with. GPs and charities are doing their best, but the size of the phenomenon is on a different scale. Government webpages are not much used to someone with air hunger who feels like they are suffocating and literally gasping for breath. Specialist Covid clinics should exist in every health board. There should be nurses peripatetically available and there should be a dedicated care pathway. Many people who suffer from long Covid end up experiencing significant financial challenges as well, either because they are unable to work or they are having to shell out money for treatments and investigations. When it comes to financial support, the benefit system has not yet responded to the debilitating condition. When it does, there is a real concern that it will not be made available to everyone. There is a particular inequality, even among long Covid sufferers themselves. In March 2020, if you cast your mind back, our testing capacity was considerably limited to healthcare staff and a very small group of other key workers. Many of the first waivers are a term that they refer to themselves and were never diagnosed with Covid-19. They exist nowhere on their medical records or, as such, it makes a definitive diagnosis all the harder. Many may never receive an official diagnosis or attendance sick leave or benefits that they may become entitled to. Most will be subjected to disbelief or accusations of malingering. Those with caring responsibilities are particularly high-risk to this and the threat of financial difficulties can end up pushing themselves beyond the limit and reducing their quality of life still further. People with long Covid are further discriminated against due to those lack of negative tests and not having been hospitalised for pre-existing inequities such as social and economic status, race and gender. I understand that I am coming to the end of my time. There is so much more that we need to say about this. We do not know how many of our citizens who caught Covid-19 in the first wave. We do not know how many are nursing it now and how many will contract it in the future. We are told that we may have to live around Covid-19 indefinitely. There is no vaccine for long Covid. We still do not know how long it lasts if it ever stops at all. This condition will occupy the attention and the business of this chamber for many years to come. It should not have taken an opposition debate in members' time to bring it to the fore for the first time. I am proud that you have done so this evening. I also thank Alex Cole-Hamilton for bringing this important topic to the Scottish Parliament for debate. The numbers of people with long Covid are high and this is a major public health matter. Over 75,000 people in Scotland today are estimated to be suffering from long Covid, and as the pandemic continues, numbers will only grow. One of my constituents, Suzanne, who is suffering from long Covid, contacted me to help me to understand the impact on Covid as it is having on her life. She told me that having contracted Covid in October 2020, I have been unable to return to a normal life. I struggled daily with fatigue and a number of other symptoms that vary on a day-to-day basis. I have gone from being a full-time working mum who studied part-time and went to the gym three times a week to somebody that I no longer recognise. I barely leave the house now, as I need to prioritise what little energy I have to take care of my two young daughters. Now, while the physical health impact from long Covid has been severe on Suzanne, the story does not end there, and there are many like her. The life-changing impact to Covid also affects the mental health of both the sufferer and of their family too. For those unable to work, long Covid is causing financial distress too. Often, for the first time in their lives, long Covid sufferers face the daunting prospect of navigating the cruel complexities of the UK social security system, a system unlikely to prove flexible enough to respond to their needs. So, while there is still much that we do not know about long Covid, we know that doing nothing is not an option that we must act, and that is why I have warmly welcomed the Scottish Government's £10 million long Covid support fund for NHS boards. That fund is an excellent start to help NHS boards to develop the flexible models of care that respond to patients' changing and varying symptoms. Those flexible care responses are essential, and people suffering from long Covid make it clear that there is a need for primary care to be strengthened, and they need to embed health staff locally to provide necessary supports, including rehabilitation services. It is also important that we ensure that long Covid knowledge hubs have the latest up-to-date information so that those suffering from long Covid can better self-manage their changing and variable symptoms. Alongside front-line investment and services, research into long Covid is vital. The Scottish Government's funding of £2.5 million to support nine research projects will be a rich source of data that can help to improve services going forward. It is this dual track of immediate strengthened service response and medium-term scientific research that will improve the long-term lives of so many Scots who are suffering from the life-changing effects of long Covid. Let us not forget our children and young people, too. While our young people are statistically less likely to suffer severe Covid symptoms, there can be long-term serious impacts on their health, too. In a personal level, I actually know two teenagers infected with Covid way back at the beginning of this pandemic. One now has immune system issues, and the other has heart complications, and both are long-term. I thank goodness that our young people are receiving vaccines in Scotland, too. Before closing, I want to highlight the grown evidence that younger working-age women are more likely to suffer from long Covid, and we cannot allow long Covid to further embed gender inequalities. Today's debate is an important opportunity to hear the voices of people who will have the experience of long Covid, and I hope that we will hear more from other members. It is only by hearing their stories and listening to their asks that we can truly embark and improve in their lives. We must listen now and we must keep on listening. Alex Cole-Hamilton, my co-convener of the cross-party group for long Covid, along with Jackie Baillie, for bringing this debate. Around 4 per cent of Scotland's workforce suffers from long Covid, and for economists looking at the macro impact on the labour market or resourcing the delivery of healthcare services, long Covid is indeed a condition of concern, but this Tuesday evening, for many of our 100,000 Scots who are struggling with fatigue, dizziness, brain fog, pain in their joints, poor mental health, long Covid is much more than a concern, is debilitating slurred speech, indescribable headaches, fluctuating heart rate, numbness, tummy issues—thousands of people out there in our country tonight can barely function. According to the latest Office for National Statistics stats, over 90,000 people in Scotland have experienced long Covid for four weeks, 70,000 for 12 weeks and 29,000 for 12 months. Let's consider this. There's been a 16 per cent increase in the number of long Covid patients since October's data was published. That's 16 per cent in one month. We're not looking at just a condition of concern. This is now a crisis in the making. In my maiden speech on 27 May, I underscored the problem of long Covid from my experience as a GP. Then, on 1 June, we debated the national health service recovery plan, and I called on the Cabinet Secretary for Health to commit to establishing a specialist on long Covid. What are we doing here in the Scottish Parliament on long Covid? After meeting the Cabinet Secretary for Health and his advisers to discuss the creation of long Covid network based on my suggestions, on 9 September, the Cabinet Secretary for Health announced £10 million long Covid support fund to help health boards to respond to the condition. Then, three weeks later, on 30 September, the Cabinet Secretary for Health provided more details, and the fund will support local services to develop and deliver the best models of care appropriate for their populations, which could include strengthening and improving the co-ordination of existing services or establishing dedicated services. I'm pleased on the fact that the Government acted on my call and made the £10 million commitment, but that said, we really need to step up a gear and sort out the details. Tackling long Covid is not simply a box-ticking exercise on a spreadsheet. As we sit here in Parliament in our privileged positions, I can't help but to think of two people who are suffering. A young mum, who used to run 5 to 10 kilometres, can now barely make it to the toilet and has moved in with her mum to look after her kids. Another teenager of school age, a teenager, said this. Mummy, how long is this going to last? I can't go on like this. To tackle long Covid, the Government needs to urgently address some of the systemic bureaucratic barriers that are hindering the delivery of an integrated long Covid service, and I would urge the Minister in closing to try to get to the heart of that problem. Long Covid requires a multidisciplinary approach. The care pathway should reflect this, and patients should be provided with a personalised care plan. Money has been allocated. There is a broad brush plan that leaves much of the decisions to the health boards, but in this Parliament we are yet to see the details. We really need to know what the health boards are doing right now. What is happening this week, this month and next month, we need a time scale and a time plan. We need to know where our suffering constituents can go for specialist treatment that isn't just England. The absence of a long Covid action plan, that is the condition of real concern. I now call Jackie Baillie, who is joining us remotely, to be followed by Emma Harper up to four minutes, please, Ms Baillie. I congratulate Alex Cole-Hamilton on securing this debate and for the content of his speech. I apologise for not being with all of you in the chamber. I am delighted that the Parliament has formally recognised the establishment of the cross-party group on long Covid, and I am delighted to be speaking in this debate, along with Alex Cole-Hamilton and Sandish Gulhane, who are both my co-convenants. Everybody in the chamber will have somebody who is a constituent who is suffering from long Covid, because, after all, there are almost 80,000 people affected, according to statistics from the ONS. They are all ages. They come from all walks of life and are experiencing many, many different problems, whether it is chronic fatigue, brain fall, cardiac problems or indeed breathing difficulties. We heard many extraordinary and sometimes harrowing accounts of how it affected people at the cross-party group. We heard from a mother whose young daughter is unrecognisable, because she used to be energetic and she used to be cheerful before Covid. She has missed so much school, missed out so many friendships. She is not quite so outgoing anymore. Then the woman who had spent a lifetime dedicated to the voluntary sector, in-paid work, currently unable to work and with an employer not willing to adapt to her condition. One of my constituencies is, in fact, a nurse in the NHS. You would think that the NHS would understand that they would be flexible, that they would want to retain her precious skills within the service, but she was feeling so harassed that she quit her job. Her skills have been lost to the NHS and she is not alone. Many employers are behaving in this way. There are many more stories. People of different ages, different backgrounds, but I want to focus on what the Scottish Government is doing, because genuinely I think that the Scottish Government has been far too slow to act. At a time when there were specialist clinics and substantial sums of money going into the NHS in England so that people could be treated alongside research and define clinical pathways existing in Wales, again with money behind them, there was nothing available in Scotland. I had people going to their GP surgery, being consultants who then referred them back to the GP, a revolving door with little support at the end of it. Let me try and find consensus this evening, because the issue is far too important to do otherwise. The cabinet secretary has put £10 million on the table, which is extraordinarily welcome. However, I do not think that it has been distributed yet to health boards. I do not think that there is a plan as to what will happen. I share with my colleagues the frustration at the lack of detail, not just for us as politicians but for long Covid sufferers and GP's trying to refer them into the system. There is undoubtedly a postcode lottery out there. Let me urge the minister and the cabinet secretary to get a move on, to take action quickly and to get the money into services where it is needed. Can I ask the minister to convey to the cabinet secretary the urgency of him having a one-to-one direct meeting with Long Covid Scotland so that the views and life experience of those who actually suffer from the condition can help to shape the proposals? Before finishing, let me talk about the gendered nature of Covid very quickly, because we need to recognise Long Covid as a disability but also as an industrial injury. Women's exposure to the virus has been greater due to the gendered patterns of work. The majority of women, the majority of front-line workers in health, social care and education have indeed been women. They have been the ones on the front line during this pandemic, more likely to catch Covid than anybody else. HSE figures bear that out. For the six months that have appeared from April to September 2020, 75 per cent of Covid employer reports made in Scotland related to women. Women aged 50 to 60 are at greatest risk of Long Covid. For all those reasons, I hope that people will support Mark Griffin's member's bill, which addresses many of those issues in relation to industrial injury, but it is time that we got serious about Long Covid. Please, I beg the Scottish Government to take action on services to listen to those with lived experience and please get a move on. Thank you. I now call Emma Harper to be followed by Beatrice Wishart up to four minutes, please, Ms Harper. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. I thank Alec Cole-Hamilton for securing it. As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, the need to understand and respond to Long Covid is increasingly pressing. We have heard about the symptoms from other colleagues of persistent fatigue, breathlessness and depression. That has been reported and it can be particularly debilitating for many. There are many other side effects that are physical and psychological and I will come to that as well. The term Long Covid is commonly used to describe signs and symptoms that continue or develop after Covid-19. Most evidence about Long Covid has been limited and based on small cohorts with short follow-up. I read research in the Lancet by Dr Lich Stu Huang and colleagues that report 12-month outcomes from the largest cohort of hospitalised adult survivors of Covid-19 so far. At one year, Covid-19 survivors had more mobility problems, pain, discomfort and anxiety or depression than control participants. Fatigue or muscle weakness was the most frequent reported symptom at both 6 months and 12 months, while almost half of patients reported having at least one symptom, such as sleep difficulties, palpitations, joint pain or chest pain at 12 months. The study shows that, for many patients, full recovery from Covid-19 will take more than a year and raises important health issues for services and research. I agree that the motion that Long Covid is indeed a condition of concern. I was particularly interested to hear about the impact of paediatric Long Covid and the work of Dr Benita Cain and Eliza Perego on that. The emerging scientific evidence shows that it is not an insignificant percentage of children, so it is significant that it develops long-term symptoms following exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. I was going to go into more detail about some of the information, further information, about paediatrics and research, but it is interesting that acute kidney disease, immune dysfunction and some of the reported lung perfusion defects and on-going inflammatory lung conditions are up to 60 days into the post-viral infection. I received an email as am from a constituent who did not want me to name the person because there are more than 1.1 million people suffering from Long Covid. Basically, the person said that research to improve the understanding of the illness is, thankfully, now emerging. The person thought that it would be helpful to explain more so that I would approach a debate using the evidence base that is now emerging. He said that caru pulmonary exercise testing has demonstrated that patients with Long Covid suffer from impaired systemic oxygen extraction. Basically, it says that it is not a psychological illness. Patients with Long Covid cannot get oxygen from their blood to themselves resulting in multi-organ oxygen starvation explaining their widespread symptoms. We have also seen that there are other summaries of acute Covid-19 causes, which causes blood clots and micro blood clots. We know that there is equipment in Scotland that can help to deal with the laboratory tests and the thrombogenic coagulation disorders that seem to be appearing in our Long Covid patients that are suffering. In summary, I would like to support what the Scottish Government is putting into place right now. I know that we are still on the initial stages of research, but we need to make sure that we are taking action and we need to do it as soon as possible. We have heard about fatigue, breathlessness, muscle aches, memory loss and persistent coughs alone all things to be concerned about. However, for some, those symptoms come all together or in a combination. For people in Shetland and many others across the country, Long Covid symptoms have led them to radically change their way of life. In the summer, I urge sufferers to contact me and NHS Shetland in order to gain an understanding of local demand for Long Covid support. It is only with an accurate understanding of how many people are still recuperating from Covid that we can get the care and assistance that patients need. After my call, I received this from a constituent who asked that I add her name to the list of people who have had Long Covid. They said that, like many others in Shetland, I caught Covid last year just as they stopped testing and told us to stay at home and not bother the NHS. I did phone 111 during a very scary 48-hour period. A callback verbally diagnosed that my constituent had Covid and also a secondary infection of the lungs and the doctor put them on a course of antibiotics. My constituent went on to say that, thankfully, I managed to get through it without having to go to hospital, but I so wish I had had the opportunity to get oxygen during the worst part. I believe that I have been living with Long Covid since overcoming the initial and secondary infections for well over a year now and I am currently battling a bout. I am lucky in that respect. I only get bad bouts of it rather than suffer badly from it all the time. I feel like I have aged a decade in a year. My mind does not work at all well now and I have less than half the energy that I used to, but I can still function normally until a random bout hits me and the various debilitating symptoms have me take to bed for three or four days. I have spoken a couple of times to a GP at the health centre and have been met with, but you have not had a positive test result, the point that others have made in this debate, and also not being believed. That sounds to me very similar to management. Many ME and chronic fatigue syndrome suffered have experienced during many years, so I wonder if we have learned anything from that condition. In the summer, I was invited to hear directly from Long Covid sufferers who had set up a support group in a church hall. I arrived but no one else turned up and it transpired that all the usual attendees were simply too poorly to come along. People who would not think twice about going to work for eight hours or taking a walk or indeed showing up to a meeting, now after having had Covid, they could not physically make the meeting as they were too unwell. In England from December last year, 60 long Covid clinics have been available, but one year later Scotland does not have any comparable clinics. Through written questions to the Government, I understand that long Covid sufferers' support for assessment diagnosis, care and rehabilitation should be in a setting that is close to their home, and that is an important point, especially for island, rural and remote communities. All that is being done is welcome, but as my colleagues Alex Cole-Hamilton has outlined, Scottish Liberal Democrats would go further with specialist long Covid clinics in every health board, the training of long Covid community nurses to offer in-home support, and country-wide access to long Covid physiotherapy in multidisciplinary rehab. A policy of no financial detriment for workers who are absent for long periods of time due to long Covid. In September, I called for a new-built hospital fit for the 21st century to replace Shetland's current ageing building. A new-built to support medical professionals deliver modernised NHS services with the equipment, space and provisions that they need. Indeed, as the long-term impact of long Covid is not known, we may be relying on our hospitals and medical professionals in a different way as the pandemic continues to challenge our knowledge. Covid has had a large impact on so many of our lives. For some, every day is now a struggle after contracting Covid, and we cannot leave those people to suffer in silence. It is a privilege to speak in this debate, and I want to echo colleagues in thanking Alex Cole-Hamilton for bringing such an important issue to the chamber today. With an estimated 75,000 people in Scotland thought to be living with the lasting effects of Covid-19 and that number only rising, the urgency of recognising, talking about and establishing how we can support people with long Covid is great and becoming greater. The phrase, nothing about us without us, is a phrase that Long Covid Scotland has included in the briefing for MSPs ahead of this debate. It is a phrase that I and many in the disability movement will know well, and that is where I will start today. It means in simple terms that decisions about long Covid must be taken with people who have long Covid. As someone who has spent years campaigning in the disability movement, I know first-hand how important it is to have a seat at the table. I also know through experience that until that happens, people with long Covid face an uphill battle to make sure that what needs to happen to protect their rights does. Today, I make the case for and ask the Government to directly and urgently engage with people with long Covid, especially long Covid Scotland, and ensure that they are involved in policy design, development and implementation every step of the way. That is a new condition, something that we do not yet properly understand, and so it is not just good practice. In fact, it is imperative that people who are living with long Covid are front and centre of what we do to support them, because only they can tell us exactly how it is impacting on their lives. The Scottish Government must listen to their experiences and their solutions and then respond with concrete actions that will address their health, social care and financial needs. In my time so far as an MSP, I have had the pleasure of meeting with hundreds of organisations across the third sector, and I have heard directly from them the impact that this condition is having. Where the Government has not been there, the third sector organisations, such as charities such as Ask Me UK, the British Lung Foundation and Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland, have, as they always do, stepped up. They are already breaking their backs and budgets to cope with the increased demand of the pandemic, and they were stretched to capacity before it, underfunded and under resourced. Now they have to support people with long Covid, which has added to the long list of the other things that they do. They all say the same thing, that there are tens of thousands of people with the condition that they continue to live unwell, unheard and unsupported, and that the Scottish Government is offering up best piecemeal support and not enough action to address their needs. I would like to first encourage the Government to support the third sector to do their work with people with long Covid, with adequate multi-year funding and support to recover from the last 20 months, and to place on record my thanks to them today, and in particular Glasgow Disability Alliance, in the region that I represent, for what they do and what they have done in this year in particular. Deputy Presiding Officer, there can be no doubt that long Covid is having a huge impact. UK-wide research has found that 71 per cent of people with it have said that it affects their family life. 80 per cent said that it affected their ability to work. Over half have had to reduce their hours and more than one in five have been left unable to work at all. More than a third have said that it has impacted their finances. Those numbers show the desperate need to provide appropriate support to and do so quickly. However, more than that, they show that this is a group of people who are experiencing socioeconomic disadvantage and are disabled by most recognised definitions. To that end, I ask the Government to recognise long Covid as an impairment for all the qualities and rights purposes, work as rights purposes and for social security. Not doing so will exacerbate the inequality that has already deep rooted in our society, particularly among women. My colleague Mark Griffin's bill to establish a Scottish Employment Injury's advisory council bill will allow us to do that. It would correct the process by which something is defined as an employment injury. It would lay the framework for a new independent statutory public body with authority to reshape and remodel the benefit, hopefully enabling Covid-19 to be recognised as an industrial disease. Recent figures have shown that 75 per cent of employer Covid-19 disease reports made in Scotland were about women employees. Given 98 per cent of workers earning poverty wages during the pandemic were women, the bill could create a safety net to prevent them from falling into poverty as a result of developing the long-lasting effects of Covid-19. In conclusion, I believe that we must see long Covid as a disabling condition and recognise and realise the rights that people have. We urgently have to have a national strategic plan to do that, developing collaboration with those who have experience of it. The Scottish Government must act to do that now and to protect and promote the equality and human rights of everyone who is living with long Covid. I now call Willie Coffey, who will be our last speaker before I ask the minister to respond to the debate. Mr Coffey is joining us remotely. Up to four minutes, please. Thank you, Presiding Officer, and thanks to Alex Cole-Hamilton for bringing this debate to the chamber. It is good to hear at least a few members welcoming the £10 million investment by the Scottish Government to help long Covid sufferers. When the pandemic stories from our constituents who did not appear to be managing the virus, no one was sure on why the symptoms persisted. We now know this to be long Covid, although it is still reasonable to say that we do not yet know enough about it even now and why it persists with some and not with others. It is important to hear the voices of our constituents who are suffering from this, and I am indebted to my constituent, Eileen, who contacted me yesterday to ask me to highlight what has happened to her. Eileen is a front-line health visitor in Ayrshire with 36 years of experience, previously fit and healthy with no underlying health conditions, but if that persists, she might never be able to work again. She managed the initial stages of her illness at home but experienced many symptoms that required visits to Crosshouse hospital. After about 13 weeks of being very unwell, she was admitted to hospital having developed neurological symptoms and was inpatient for three weeks. Paid for private neurology advice, which led to more investigations but, alas, no treatment. The best advice was drug management of some of the symptoms and to wait and see how it developed. Occupational therapy and some physiotherapy followed. Eileen continues to be supported at home by staff from the Douglas Grant rehab centre. Either just a few of the impacts that she has to cope with at home, she has to sit in a stool in her kitchen to do simple food preparation and empty a dishwasher because she has not the energy to do it without us. Sometimes she cannot even do that. She has to use a seat in her shower. Even going upstairs in her house is a major task since it gives her heart palpitations and breath losses. She cannot even put her washing outside and has to use a walking stick in the house at all times and she has been downed more often than not. Eileen has gone from a relatively fit and healthy individual to a shadow of her former self and with no sign of it letting up. The question of fatigue, she experiences and the isolation at home is having a wider impact on her mental health now. Presiding Officer, she is in this story but Eileen's permission, of course, will resonate with many other members' accounts and I am sure that many other people are watching the debate today too. At this moment, her future and that of many long Covid sufferers is at best uncertain. Her ability to do almost everything for herself has been replaced by an inability to do anything. A huge transformation in her health and co-operative life. One of her messages to me said I feel like a pinball machine with the Covid having hit every cell in my body at some point over the last 19 months. I am single with a mortgage and I am so worried for my future. Presiding Officer, Eileen's story is not unique but it is heartbreaking and it has become urgent. My hope is that when the minister sums up, we will hear some more about the research funding and on-going support for long Covid sufferers. Perhaps also about potential beneficial treatments that we are reading about. For example, hyperbaric treatment appears to be having some positive impact. But hopefully most of all, I hope that we can hear that long Covid sufferers are very much in the minds of both Governments to make sure that they will continue to be supported in terms of their employment and financial obligations and that the recovery from the physical and mental health trauma that they are suffering will be a top priority as they continue to endure this incredibly debilitating condition. I now call Minister Marie Todd to respond to the debate up to some minutes please, Mr Todd. Thank you Presiding Officer and all the members who have taken part in discussing this important issue. Let me assure you that this Government does recognise the negative impact that long Covid can have on the physical and mental wellbeing of those affected and we are committed to making sure that people with long Covid receive the best possible care and support in a setting that is appropriate and as close to home as possible. A key point to note in our approach in Scotland. Our response to long Covid is built on a range of well integrated support already being delivered across Scotland by our NHS social care and third sector partners. Support is available through local primary care teams, community-based rehabilitation services and referral to secondary care for further investigation and advice where necessary, depending and I stress on what is right for the individual. Given the wide spectrum of needs that people affected with long Covid can have, we know that the full range of skills and knowledge of our multidisciplinary teams are required and that is why we are investing £155 million through our primary care improvement fund to support the development of those teams. That includes, for example, the recruitment of further community nurses to assist with diagnostic tests and chronic disease management, physiotherapists to treat musculoskeletal issues in the community as well as pharmacists to help with repeat prescriptions and medicine reviews. In our programme for government this year, we committed to publishing a paper setting out our approach to care and support for people with long Covid. We delivered on this commitment in 30 September. Our paper sets out support that people with long Covid can expect and outlines 16 commitments to deliver a range of improvements. I would like to— Alex Cole-Hamilton? I am very grateful to the minister for giving away. She seems very confident in the offer that the Scottish Government is giving to sufferers of long Covid. She has rightly outlined the document and strategy paper and the money in action points that the Government has identified, but the long Covid community reported being devastated by that and felt that it was far too little, far too late. Is she telling this Parliament and the long Covid community that that is the full extent of the offer to long Covid sufferers or is there more to come? No, I am not saying that that is the full offer. What I will do is set out some of the initiatives that we have already delivered on. I will look to other countries in the UK and I will also, during the course of this speech, talk about some of the things that we are looking to deliver for those individuals who are experiencing long Covid. Some of the initiatives that we have already delivered on, giving people access to clear information, is a key part of supporting them to feel more in control of their condition. Last month, we launched a new long Covid information platform in NHS Inform, specifically designed to help people with their recovery. We have invested £40,000 in public awareness campaign with information displayed in community pharmacies across Scotland about how people can access further advice and support in relation to their symptoms. We are supporting clinicians to access evidence-based information and advice on long Covid. We are actively supporting the application of the UK-wide clinical guideline and have worked with specialists to develop a long Covid implementation support node. That gives clinicians across Scotland practical help around their appropriate assessments, investigations and referrals for their patients. We recognise the vital work of third sector organisations across the country in supporting people and communities. That is why we have provided funding of £460,000 to Chest Heart and Stroke Scotland to enable them to deliver their long Covid support service. Through that service, people can speak to nurses who are trained in managing some of the most common long Covid symptoms, such as breathlessness and fatigue. The real-life experiences of people living with long Covid will continue to be a vitally important aspect of informing our approach. The cabinet secretary will meet this month with a whole range of organisations representing and supporting people with long Covid, which will be in a really helpful part of informing our evolving understanding of the condition and of people's needs. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, for taking the intervention. Can you confirm whether that will include the organisation Long Covid Scotland? We have backed up the delivery of the commitments outlined in our approach paper with a £10 million long Covid support fund, which will provide NHS boards with further resource to respond in a flexible and tailored manner to the needs of people with long Covid, as well as appropriate training and education of staff. Recognising Scotland's unique geography and population distribution, the fund will support local services to develop and deliver the best models of care that are appropriate for local populations. That could include strengthening and improving the co-ordination of existing services or establishing dedicated long Covid assessment clinics if a health board identifies that this is an appropriate response to meet local needs. Mr Cole-Hamilton has made unhelpful comparisons to England, and it might be helpful for him to reflect on the reality of patients' experiences of accessing service there. Just last week, Francesca Steele wrote in the Times of her own experience of referal to an NHS England long Covid clinic. Her story is one of lengthy waiting lists, no follow-up, and ultimately, in her own words, the clinic was not the solution that she had hoped for. The clinic that I have been talking about since I made the speech was the Hotfisher model, and that is the best clinic that I have heard of. The one that I would like to bring up is that it has fantastic patient feedback and also has a GP and a dedicated team who look after the patients as they come back. Will that not be the model to talk about in best practice? Certainly, we are willing to look around the UK. Obviously, we are working on a four-nations basis in terms of, well, we are certainly working with NICE and with the Royal College of GPs and Sine working together in terms of developing clinical guidelines. There is absolutely no reason why we would not look at areas of best practice in England, but Ms Steele's experience is reflected in the findings of a survey, so our experience is not unique. It is reflected in the findings of a survey conducted by the group long Covid support, which found that only 26 per cent of respondents were satisfied with their experience of NHS England's long Covid clinics, and 58 per cent of those people were dissatisfied. We do not want to make this a political fight. We want to concentrate on supporting people in Scotland in the best way possible for their needs. We have learned a lot about Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, and there is still a lot more that we need to understand, particularly in relation to its long term effects. We do it very briefly, because you are running out of time. I appreciate that you have taken many interventions. I know that we have some diagnostic tests already that look at fluorescence microscopes and thromboelastography, such as TIG and platelet mapping. Is that part of the Government's work to take long Covid management forward? I assure the member that the clinical community in Scotland is looking at all the evidence that has been produced. The clinical community across the UK works together to produce guidance very quickly in responding to a new disease. The guidance is updated very soon, so it is certainly looking at the evidence base. The minister should really bring her remarks to a close, Mr Cole-Hamilton. I think that she has been fairly generous in interventions. Just to mention before I close, the Government has committed to funding research to 2.5 million to nine research projects, which covers a wide range of approaches and will address many of those questions that will greatly increase the clinical knowledge base on long Covid. I welcome the opportunity that this debate has given me to set out some of the actions that the Government is taking to ensure that people with long Covid in Scotland can get the right support for them—support that is evidence-based, effective, safe and person-centred—an approach that is not one-size-fits-all but provides support that is wrapped around the individual and enables them to access the right care in the right place at the right time.