Meeting of the Parliament 21 February 2024
Like the offices of all other members in this debate, my constituency office receives a huge number of contacts from people who present with very serious problems because of lack of access to NHS dentistry. For a while, the nearest place for people in my constituency to access an NHS dentist was Invergordon, where they had to go instead of Inverness. I see no point in using the short time that I have to repeat those stories, but they are toe curling, as Willie Rennie’s stories were at the beginning of the debate.
I raised those concerns with the minister, Jenny Minto, and she pointed to a range of actions. I was extremely impressed with the minister’s demeanour, the obvious care and time that she had devoted to the matter and the follow-up response, which outlined a number of those measures. I would be grateful if she could say how progress has been made on the access initiative, the recruitment and retention allowance, and the remote areas allowance. I praise the minister for her work. As members may have noticed, I do not tend characteristically to sprinkle praise on ministers—perhaps that is a failing on my part, but that is for others to judge.
In this debate, I want to make the wider case for what I suggested in the previous debate, because it applies—as the lawyers say—mutatis mutandis. Just as we see a flood of young people leaving Scotland to practise their medical profession elsewhere in the world, we are seeing nurses, teachers and dentists doing likewise. I do not know the number of those people. I was heartened that the new cabinet secretary said that he would get that data, and I think that that is very important to have.