4. Presiding Officer,

“She cries to us, she’s terrified of being alone, she’s distraught and she’s almost 94. Our hearts are breaking and mum’s spirit is broken.”

No one is saying that the First Minister does not care about residents who are isolated from their families in care homes. Yesterday, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport said that she was having more discussions on the issue tomorrow, but I am sure that the First Minister will understand my frustration, given that that is what she told me two weeks ago. More discussions will take more time, and time is precious for these people. When will families get to see their loved ones?

I do care. We all care deeply about the issue. Among a whole series of tough decisions that Governments everywhere are having to take right now, the decisions on that issue are probably the toughest. On the one hand, I desperately want families of residents in care homes to have normal visiting; on the other hand, I desperately want to do everything that we can to avoid the risk of Covid getting into care homes, because we know from the dreadful experience earlier in the year about the harm and damage that that does and the toll that it can take in terms of deaths. Therefore, we are treating those issues carefully, and we are considering the issues deeply.

We want to get back to a greater degree of normality. The health secretary has met with family representatives, and we are acutely aware of the importance of visiting for health and wellbeing. A process is already under way, which started in late June, if memory serves me correctly. That is a staged approach to the reintroduction of visits in care homes. It started with outdoor visits and now care homes are looking to reintroduce indoor visiting. The restrictions that were announced last week for the population have not affected that. In fact, part of the reason for putting those restrictions in place is to try to get the virus under control so that we do not have a situation in which we cannot proceed to greater flexibility around care home visiting.

These are difficult issues, and they take time, because they need the best clinical consideration and advice. We will continue to take those decisions with the greatest possible care, and we will seek to do so in a way that enables families to have as much normality as possible around their visits to, care of and interaction with their loved ones in care homes.

I understand that the decisions are tough, but they will not get any easier if we keep on delaying them. The families want to see their loved ones. It has been months now, and they are desperate. I know that the First Minister understands that, but I urge her to try to move faster on the issue, because that is what the families need.

The First Minister knows about the horrendous problems with the flu vaccine programme in Fife. Thousands of calls have been missed and there are tens of thousands of anxious and angry people. There have been traffic jams at flu centres in Edinburgh, and NHS Borders has apologised for the problems there. That should be a warning to the Scottish Government for the roll-out of any Covid vaccine. From school exams to university terms, the Scottish Government has not been great at hearing warnings and acting on them effectively. If we get a Covid vaccine, we need to be ready. What is the First Minister doing to ensure that the rush this week for the flu vaccine does not turn into a stampede in a few months with any Covid vaccine?

The First Minister:

I will return to the issue of care homes before I move on to the issues of vaccines.

I absolutely take Willie Rennie’s points about care home visiting in the spirit that they are intended, and they are extremely legitimate points. I simply say that, although none of us wants to delay things unduly, on such issues we have to take care that we get the decisions right. Unfortunately, we have a rising tide of Covid and we are starting to see cases again in care homes. We want to ensure that we have all the appropriate protections in place so that we do not see a repeat of the experience in care homes that we had earlier in the year.

These are difficult decisions, and I am not saying that just to excuse the fact that we have not got to the point that Willie Rennie is asking me to get to; I am simply underlining why it is so important to get those decisions right. Unfortunately, that sometimes means taking a bit of time over them, but that is for the best possible reasons.

The flu vaccine programme officially starts today. I encourage everybody who is eligible for the vaccine to take it up. In recent weeks, we have seen scientific opinion about the particular dangers to people of getting Covid and flu together, so we should all encourage people to take up the flu vaccine.

There have been some issues in certain health boards—for example, Willie Rennie mentioned the situation in Fife. NHS Fife has increased the number of call handlers and the number of staff who are working on the issue, and measures have been put in place to ensure that the resources are there to enable everybody who comes forward for an appointment for the flu vaccine to get the vaccine. Some people might not be aware of the fact that we are delivering the vaccine in a different way this year because of the risk of Covid that would be involved in doing it in the way that we normally do it.

On the related issue of a possible Covid vaccine—I would dearly love to be in the position, in a few months, of being able to start rolling out a Covid vaccine; I genuinely do not know whether that will be possible—we already have a programme board that is looking at the practical issues around that. Discussions are taking place with the UK Government on procurement and what volumes are likely to be available. We do not yet know who the priority groups would be, because we do not yet know what vaccine is likely to be approved first or for whom it is mostly likely to be effective. However, we are very plugged into all those discussions, and we have a planning process under way so that, as we get more information, we can take the relevant decisions in an orderly fashion.

A report has been published today that is quite sobering; I read an embargoed copy last night, and I would encourage everybody to read it. Although the report—which has been produced for the Royal Society—is optimistic about the progress that is being made on vaccines, it is sobering when it comes to some of the practical issues that we face in getting from here to a position in which we can actually start to vaccinate large numbers of the population. As I said, the Scottish Government is already thinking about how we can work through all those issues when more information becomes available.