Hansard

I am grateful to members for their contributions. I found them all very interesting. They included a degree of history and a degree of insight. I am particularly grateful for the level of support that members are offering the bill at stage 1.

As colleagues said, it is a single-purpose bill. I emphasise that so that we are all clear that the passing of the bill, once it has gone through stage 2 and come back to Parliament at stage 3, will neither be determinative nor provide for the University of St Andrews to offer a full PMQ medicine degree on its own. That is a matter for future discussions. Claire Baker set out clearly what will need to happen should we have another medical school that is separate from the existing medical schools.

I want to single out a few points that have been made. I particularly agree with the points that Alex Rowley made in expressing his support for the bill. Willie Rennie made the point, again in support of the bill, that the University of St Andrews is the only higher education institution in the whole UK that is barred from offering a degree in a discipline. What we are trying to do, as members have acknowledged, is simply to remove a prohibition that was never intended to be anything other than transitionary and whose continuance is unfair on the particular institution but also on higher education across Scotland as a whole.

Emma Harper made an important point about the importance of rural medicine, which I will return to, and Liz Smith made an important point with respect to research.

On rural medicine, I agree with Daniel Johnson’s point. I would never gainsay the challenges that we have in general practice and other areas of our NHS, and there is a lot of work for us to do in rebuilding our health service following the pandemic. I hope that that will not necessarily be done exclusively on a business-as-usual basis but will involve some of the innovative thinking and delivery with which we have seen our health service respond to the pandemic.

However, I make the point in passing—I am sure that Mr Cameron could not help himself—that Scotland has more GPs per 100,000 of the population than any other part of the United Kingdom. Of course, we seek to increase that and improve on that position.

That brings me to ScotGEM, which is a very innovative programme that is designed and delivered by both the University of St Andrews and the University of Dundee. They are to be congratulated on that. It has a number of special elements, such as the use of general practitioners as clinical teachers and a focus on rural practice and rural medicine. In my two years as health secretary, I have understood very clearly that there is much about the delivery of rural medicine that is important for those in more urban settings to learn from.

I was asked about the bursary. For every year of bursary, students commit to working for NHS Scotland for one year, on graduation. Ninety-four per cent of the current ScotGEM cohort of 165 students have made that commitment. It is clear to me that those students will be retained by NHS Scotland for at least an initial period—and, I am sure, for much longer.

Daniel Johnson made well a point about ScotGEM offering us an insight into the widening ways in which people can access routes into medicine, and I hope that we will see more such innovative approaches to medical undergraduate education.

In conclusion, I repeat my thanks to members. The bill has a single purpose but is very important. I am grateful for members’ support. I hope that Parliament will agree later to support the general principles of the bill at stage 1, and I look forward to stages 2 and 3.