Hansard

Yes, of course we will. We are in the middle of a pay negotiation. I note that the pay deal that we provided in the previous financial year was the best and highest single-year settlement in the history of devolution. We have a good record when it comes to pay negotiations. I completely understand that, on behalf of their members, the trade unions want us to go faster in the pay negotiation. I accept that. I also accept the point that we are well past 1 April without a concluded pay negotiation, so I give the absolute promise and commitment, without prejudicing the negotiation, that we will backdate pay to at least 1 April.

There are other benefits of being a nurse in Scotland. I thank our student nurses, who have done an incredible job throughout the pandemic. They do not pay tuition fees, which they would do in other parts of the UK.

I want to touch on challenges, but, before I do that, I thank members for their exceptionally powerful testimonies. We heard from Mairi McNair about her mother. We heard from Jeremy Balfour about the care and attention that he has received and that his father is receiving. We heard from Gillian Mackay about the attention that her mother and grandpa have received. We heard about Carol Mochan’s friend—forgive me, I should have taken a note of their name—who has worked tirelessly for our NHS. Most recently, we heard from Stephanie Callaghan about Roz, Jean and Arlene.

I pay tribute to every single nurse in our country for the incredible work that they have done. I am the first to recognise that all our nurses, whether they work in community or acute sites, are facing probably the most difficult period of their professional and personal lives. I know that nurses take their work home, perhaps not quite literally, but those pressures do not just go away the moment that they walk out of a hospital or away from the community site in which they work. Nurses who have worked in the NHS for 30 or 40 years have told me that the past two years have been the most difficult in their entire career.

I mention that point because, although we have a good record on recruitment—I have given some statistics on that—and we will continue to recruit, Jackie Baillie and other members who made the point are absolutely right that retention is key.

Gillian Mackay, Alex Cole-Hamilton and Jackie Baillie were at the round table that I attended; Craig Hoy, who is not in the chamber, was also there. We heard very clearly that there needs to be better flexibility in the NHS, particularly for staff who might want to reduce their hours but are not given the choice to do so and then decide to work through an agency. When that happens, we have to pay them higher rates to come back in to do shifts. On the back of that round table, I give a commitment that we will look at greater flexibility.

Taking care of the wellbeing of our nurses is essential. We have a record £12 million investment in wellbeing, but I have heard recently from nurses who, rightly and fairly, have said, “That is great but, if we don’t have time to access the wellbeing services, what good is it for us?”.

To members who are rightly raising concerns about the challenges that nurses are facing, I note that the reason why I mentioned the past two years is that, notwithstanding the fact that there were challenges before, the pandemic has severely exacerbated those challenges. That is why nurses tell us that the past two years have been the most difficult—not the past five or 10 years, although I accept that there were challenges before. In the past two years, nurses have been put under pressure that goes beyond any challenge that any of us could have envisaged before.

The number 1 thing that we can do to alleviate the pressure in the immediate term is to keep Covid under control. If we do that, it will begin to alleviate some of the pressure, although it will not happen overnight. As I have said, it will take not weeks or months but years to recover our NHS, but there are actions that we can take immediately, and we are working right now on pay, terms and conditions, recruitment and retention.

I thank Alex Cole-Hamilton for mentioning Mary Seacole, who I was going to mention—it is very important that we do so. Understandably, we give a lot of focus to Florence Nightingale and Louisa Jordan. As many members will know, Mary Seacole was a nurse and a woman of colour who did an outstanding job, particularly in the Crimean war. However, I will not say any more about her, because Alex Cole-Hamilton spoke very well about the incredible contribution that she made to nursing.

Quite rightly, I have been asked about the implementation of the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act 2019, which was referenced in the round table that many members attended. Honestly and truthfully, we are not in the position right now to implement the act, because of the challenges that that would have for our recovery and remobilisation. However, on the back of the round table, I have promised to produce an implementation plan, which I will publish in relatively short order.

Let me finish where I started by thanking Jackie Baillie for lodging an incredible motion. I give even more thanks to our nurses up and down the country for their phenomenal effort. Let me give them a promise. I hear their message. They require deeds, not words, and I promise them, as we have promised in previous years, that we will honour the debt that we owe them, and we will ensure that we value them and recognise the incredible contribution that they have made.