Meeting of the Parliament 11 February 2026 [Draft]
I thank the cabinet secretary for that.
Along with the public inquiry, the oversight group will, we hope, help to answer any questions that patients, families and staff have about what went wrong at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital, who is responsible, how they will be held to account and how we can move forward.
I hope that the Scottish Government will fully embrace the opportunity that the oversight group gives us to make progress while we are waiting for the full outcomes of the inquiry. We must not squander that opportunity, because too many people have been let down and traumatised by the failings at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital. The oversight group must be open, transparent and—crucially—accountable. That is why it is imperative, as I mentioned earlier, that patient and staff representatives are on the group. I appreciate the cabinet secretary’s confirmation that that will be the case. Pastoral support must be offered to those staff and patient representatives. What some of them will have been through is unimaginable, and it is vital that a trauma-informed approach is taken, so that their suffering is not compounded by reliving the events at the hospital.
Despite my reservations about the wording of the Labour motion, I will vote for it at decision time, as I said in my opening speech. The Scottish Government still has questions to answer about the Queen Elizabeth university hospital, and we would not be doing our jobs as MSPs if we did not put those questions to the cabinet secretary. We must keep putting questions, for as long as it takes for them to be answered, to whoever needs to answer them. We need to get to the bottom of what has happened at the hospital, which often means robustly challenging the Government and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. I think that we can do that in a way that avoids retraumatising or potentially scaring people out of treatment.
It is vital that we do not lose sight of the people who have been most affected—the patients, their loved ones and the grieving families. Their pain and suffering must be at the forefront of our minds at all times.