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That is a pertinent question on the wider issues that are beyond the control of the health and social care service in rural and island communities in being able to attract and retain staff. Mr Torrance rightly points to the issue of housing. I know from the most recent conversation that I had with NHS Highland about the situation at Portree that it is looking at what it can do from a housing perspective to support staff with their housing needs.

Wider measures such as the Scottish Government’s investment in the rural delivery plan and the emergency services key worker housing funds that we are bringing forward are designed to give local areas the ability to invest in ensuring that the social infrastructure is there to support people living and working in those communities and that those communities continue to be sustainable.

There are also wider political issues around attracting and retaining social care staff in particular. Mr Torrance and the committee will be aware of the recent decision of the UK Government to make it harder for social care staff to come to this country to work by stopping the dependants of those social care workers from being able to travel. Obviously, we are not in control of immigration and the decisions that are taken for us are having a detrimental impact on our ability to attract people to come and live and work here. Everybody is well aware that the impact of Brexit on our social care workforce was a near 10 per cent reduction in our social care staffing, almost overnight.

All of that strikes at the heart of the ability of social care providers to provide the services that we need them to provide, which has a knock-on impact not just on the people who we need to be providing those services for but on the rest of the health service, because there needs to be a clear flow through the health service and, if one part is under significant pressure, in this case social care, it has an impact elsewhere.

Paula Speirs would like to come in on the back of that.

It is the single island authority model. We are looking at what is possible with regard to local government and health boards working more closely together. Advanced discussions are going on with the island groups, with various levels of interest being expressed by those authorities.

In rural areas, there are more examples of that coming through.

Obviously, I am conscious of the need to ensure that we have as equitable access to health provision across Scotland’s geography as possible. Mr Sweeney points to an important conundrum on recruitment and retention. Typically, accident and emergency clinicians look for a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. That is what they thrive on. When I shadowed some accident and emergency shifts, that is what many of the A and E consultants told me. That is what drove them to go into accident and emergency, as opposed to any other specialty.

I have friends and family who use the Balfour hospital in Kirkwall. Far fewer people go through the accident and emergency department there than any of the accident and emergency departments in the central belt, for instance. That will have an impact on the attractiveness of the department. That is part of the reason why we have come through with the initiatives that Stephen Lea-Ross spoke about, to try to get people to specialise in remote, rural and island healthcare as early as possible. That means that they will probably take a more multidisciplinary approach to their training and will understand what they are going into. I hope that they will be more willing to stay in a remote and rural setting, understanding the fact that it is a very different environment from an accident and emergency department elsewhere.

I am also cognisant of the situation in Portree, which was a sad incident. My condolences go to the family of the person who lost their life. We are working with NHS Highland on bringing back 24-hour urgent care to Portree as quickly as possible.

I have not directly discussed the issue in relation to AHPs, but I am more than happy to take it away for Ms Mochan and report back. Indeed, I should probably be having such a discussion, so Ms Mochan’s suggestion is useful.

It is absolutely central, because we cannot have a sustainable and improving health service without a sustained and improving workforce. I am very proud of our incredible workforce. In the past 14 weeks, I have been able to see some of it in action. As health secretary, and previously as a user of the health service, I have seen the fantastic work that our workforce delivers.

On interaction with the workforce around reform, I am keen to hear directly from the workforce, its representatives and the trade unions on setting out how we move forward in a sustainable way and how we make sure that we continue to see improvements. I am keen to hear from the workforce about its ideas for changing how the health service works to make it more responsive to the needs of the people of Scotland and to make sure that it continues to be sustainable.

Having discussed the issue with people over the past few months, I know that that must be about making sure that we prevent ill health. The public health work that we are doing is of critical importance in making sure that we have a healthier population, in stopping the continued escalation in demand that we have on our health service and in making the shift on the flexibility of our employment patterns. We have seen some of that in the implementation of changes under agenda for change over recent weeks. That is where we will need to go, but that has to be informed by discussions with the workforce, which I am committed to having as part of the reform discussions.

That is under active consideration, as Ms White will understand, given what happened on Skye recently. Sir Lewis Ritchie undertook a review of the services on Skye; with him, I met NHS Highland, and I expect to have a delivery plan from the board for how that review and its recommendations can return to implementation. The review was implemented for a period, but there were issues with sustainability, for the pertinent reasons that we have heard around attracting and retaining staff in rural and island communities. I am keen to ensure that Highland can deliver on that.

That is a microcosm of what we need to see to a much greater extent across the country. We are working with our rural boards in the areas that I have set out, which include supporting our workforce and supporting the work that NHS Education for Scotland is doing to provide education and training so that urgent care services in remote and rural areas can continue to be sustainable.

It increasingly sounds as though the session on Skye was incredibly productive, and I am ever more regretful that I was not a part of it so that I could hear directly from the colleagues that Ms Mackay refers to.

We are in a situation where we do not have the luxury—although I do not think that it is a luxury, actually—of being siloed; we cannot afford that. We need to use the capacity that is available, regardless of where it comes from. There must be much greater collaboration between public sector agencies. The integration agenda is about much greater collaboration between our health and social care partnerships, or IJBs, and our statutory partners, as well as the community and the voluntary sector. As Ms Mackay rightly said, that sector often provides services that statutory providers cannot provide to the same level of funding. We have to see much greater collaboration there.

We must also utilise the expertise and innovation that are coming through from the private sector. If we can harness that, we have an opportunity to stay true to the principles of the NHS being publicly owned and free at the point of need and delivery. We need to harness some of the products that are being delivered by the academic and private sector to free up clinical capacity for the care that clinicians and health service staff give. We have an opportunity to take forward much greater collaboration, if we can, to continue to improve and reform our health service for the better.

We are in discussions with NHS Grampian on the point to which Ms White referred and the particular example that she highlighted, which she has also raised in the chamber. We have been working with NHS Grampian to look at what it is doing. That includes work to improve the flow through the hospital so that we are not seeing ambulances stacked up outside.

The national centre for sustainable delivery is doing work to look at how we ensure that those who are in our hospitals actually need to be there and at how we can improve the delayed discharge picture so that we have hospital beds available. Ultimately, that is at the heart of why we have had delays, certainly in Scotland. I cannot speak for the rest of the UK, but that is certainly what I am picking up here. If we are seeing delays in ambulances being able to turn around at hospital, that is largely because of a lack of availability of beds.

We are using the centre for sustainable delivery to identify patients who can be discharged and get them discharged as quickly as possible, and thereby bring down the average hospital occupancy time. We are also working on that with our local government partners. I work closely with Councillor Paul Kelly of the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, and we have agreed on work that is to be done across Scotland on giving people patient discharge dates, discharging before noon and weekend discharge. We are looking at everything that we possibly can to get people to where they should be, which is either at home or in the community, rather than in hospital.

We are also doing more focused work with our health and social care partners in Grampian on whether anything further can be done to improve the delayed discharge picture and to improve integration in NHS Grampian. I would be happy to update the committee on that work.

I think it entirely fair for an advisory board that will look at the bank’s performance to wait for the bank to be established before it can be functional. However, work is on-going to establish the advisory board that will provide additional assurance measures, beyond those that are already in place for a non-departmental public body and a public limited company, to ensure that we have confidence—which I do; I have no reason not to—in the bank’s decisions and performance.