Living wage and access to medicines raised in Convener's Group

This week the First Minister appeared in front of the conveners of all the Holyrood committees. It was the third time the Conveners Group has questioned a First Minister on the Government’s legislative programme.

Health and Sport Committee convener Duncan McNeil was first up, and he raised two questions.

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Firstly he referred to the committee’s report of 2011 on elderly care where members recommended social care staff should be paid the Living wage.

“I know the Government and local authorities are working hard to try and achieve that. Can you give me an update on those talks? What progress has been made and when are we likely to get a outcome?” he asked.

Nicola Sturgeon said she couldn’t provide a timescale for improving the pay of those working in care homes or providing care in patient’s homes. “I can say the Health secretary, with COSLA and local authorities, is looking very hard at how we can extend the principle and the practice of the living wage into the social care workforce,” she said.

Secondly, McNeil asked about access to medicines, based on a report the committee produced in 2013. “In early 2014 the government responded and announced the patient voice would be put at the centre of the new drugs approval process. However recently I’ve heard all three breast cancer drugs put through the new system have been rejected.”

He also raised a case where a patient had been refused a drug through the IPTR process despite support from her oncologist.

Sturgeon said the Scottish Government had worked to improve, “streamline and make the procedures the SMC use more transparent than they were previously”, including a reactive rare drugs fund.

However, she said, “we will always have what we’re talking about here –difficult cases where either groups of patients or individual patients are not able to access a drug that they believe understandably would be a benefit to them. Because the nature of these things, and the procedures in place, is that that is inevitable. What we want to do is minimise the cases in which that happens.”