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You are absolutely right to highlight that baby loss impacts not just the mum but the father. I said clearly that we talk about family-centred care, so I include the father and, in fact, the entire extended family.

You will be aware that, before I came into politics, I was an antenatal teacher. I talked a lot about how babies are sometimes born in a medical event, but they are always born in a social event—they are always born into a community and family, and the whole family and community need support when things go wrong.

You are right that pregnancy is an uncertain time and that sometimes things do not go as expected. Since 2017, we have provided more than £16 million in funding to support the implementation of “The Best Start: A Five-Year Forward Plan for Maternity and Neonatal Care in Scotland”, which we think is the solution to many of the challenges and traumas that people face during pregnancy. That five-year plan was published in 2017 and, as I said, it remains a firm programme for government commitment. Person-centred high-quality care for mums and babies throughout pregnancy and birth, and following birth, can have a marked effect on the life chances of women and babies and families, and on the healthy development of the child throughout their life.

We are aiming for gold-standard care. We want truly family-centred care that will maximise the opportunities to establish building blocks for strong family relationships and for confident and capable parenting. One cornerstone of that type of care is the continuity of carer. There has been a lot of discussion on that with regard to baby loss. Continuity of carer has a significant impact on, and makes a difference to, the experience of people and families who have lost a baby.

We are continuing to introduce continuity of carer in maternity services. That is the care that midwives have told us they want to deliver—the type of care that they want to be involved in—but it is also the care that women have told us they want to receive. They want to build a relationship with a midwife, not just through their pregnancy, birth and beyond, but in subsequent pregnancies. Where there has been loss or trauma in one pregnancy, continuity of carer becomes absolutely vital in subsequent pregnancies.

The best start approach equips midwives with the skills to care for women with socially complex needs and their babies. The midwives have reduced case loads, and there is continuity of carer. There is additional training, and there are clear pathways of care and co-ordinated multi-agency support. The best start for any baby is that the mum receives continuity of carer from a primary midwife who is supported by a small team. That primary midwife is really important for women with additional complex needs, such as those with substance misuse issues.

As I said, work is under way to produce nationally consistent guidance and pathways and to cope with different levels of complexity. The midwife will always be the lead carer, but there might be a greater need to work closely with other services. Early access to care is important for building a high-quality antenatal relationship between the mum or family and the midwife. It is really important for mum and baby.

For women with a whole range of medical, social and psychological complexities, early intervention and co-ordinated multi-agency care make a massive difference to outcomes. That begins at the initial booking appointment, when the midwife first sees the mum during pregnancy. At that stage, women are asked a variety of questions about their wellbeing in order to assess the likelihood that they have additional needs.

My colleague Kevin Stewart might want to talk specifically about some of the perinatal mental health approaches that support women from the antenatal period right through to the postnatal period.

Kevin Stewart mentioned delivery of services being different in different parts of the country. Delivery of universal services has looked different during the pandemic, as well. Antenatal classes moved to online delivery and breastfeeding support groups have, largely, moved to closed Facebook groups and other social media.

Social media have provided virtual opportunities to connect not only mums who have babies but families, and to encourage outdoor meet-ups. Around the country, walk and talk groups have begun. That has happened out of necessity—because it is safer to meet outdoors than it is to meet indoors and small numbers are safer than large numbers. However, as a public health minister who is thinking about the general health of the population and the challenges that we have in getting people active and maintaining healthy weight—it is particularly important for women to be a healthy weight during pregnancy—I hope that that continues. The opportunity to meet up outdoors and walk together—to socialise through exercise—is probably a valuable step forward, but I look forward to the day when it is not the only option.

You have heard, throughout our evidence, about joined-up care and the holistic approach. Those concepts are a cornerstone of care in the perinatal period. We are taking specific actions to improve joined-up services for women and families with complex needs, including those in which there is substance use. We have talked about that and the best start approach.

Prior to the pandemic, we made a significant investment in increasing health visiting. We have increased the health visiting workforce by almost 50 per cent in order to build capacity and to provide more support to individuals who need it. That represents a significant difference between the approach in Scotland and the approach in the other UK nations. That is because we recognise the incredibly valuable role that our health visiting teams play for new families. We have invested in them and have supported them in their role.

I will bring in Kirstie Campbell to give you the most up-to-date picture of delivery across the country. Kirstie, can you give information on where we are at the moment and where we hope to be early next year? I am aware that we are again in uncertain times because of the pandemic.

It will come as no surprise to you to hear that I believe that universal services play a key role in the prevention and early detection of perinatal mental health problems, from pre-conception onwards. Public health messaging on awareness of mental health and positive health behaviours and relationships has a significant impact on subsequent emotional wellbeing.

All the members of the team—midwives, health visitors and family nurse practitioners—play a crucial role in identifying and preventing perinatal mental health problems. That is why we have invested in the NES perinatal and infant mental health curricular framework that we have discussed. It offers a suite of multidisciplinary training options to support universal and specialist staff to develop their knowledge and skills so that they can feel confident about addressing mental health and wellbeing issues with the women whom they work with. You might want to discuss it further with Kevin Stewart, but I believe that all mental health staff can also access those modules, especially those who work in relevant specialist areas.

With regard to universal services, perinatal mental health is a fundamental part of the core curriculum. We are trying hard to make sure that, regardless of where staff work or their specialty, perinatal mental health is an important part of their training and of their continuing professional development, as they go through their working lives.

Dr Marion Bain, who is a deputy chief medical officer and was involved in developing the women’s health plan, can give you a little more information about PCOS.

It has been suggested to me that a number of conditions should have been included in the plan. I recognise that it is not all-encompassing. The plan and its priorities were developed with input from women, and we agreed with women who have lived experience the areas that we should target first.

The plan is momentous and I love the fact that Scotland is leading the way with it. I am determined for the plan to deliver tangible change for women, but it is just a start. There is more to come to tackle the health inequalities that women experience as a whole.

As a rural MSP, I am focusing on that. We must make sure that people in rural areas benefit as much as others. We should not default to centralising public services far away from them.

I will bring in Michael Kellet to give you a bit more information about the cross-Government work that is going on. However, one of the things that we in the Scottish Government have always recognised but which has become even clearer with the pandemic is that siloed working will not serve the citizens of Scotland. As a result, a great deal more cross-Government work is going on than there ever was before, and the Deputy First Minister, in his Covid recovery role, has a cross-portfolio role to ensure that policies join up across Government. There is work going on across Government on such issues.

On the universal basic income, health inequalities are, as I have said, related to wealth inequalities, so the solution to health inequalities lies in ensuring that people have an adequate income. We need to tackle individual disempowerment, and there are undoubtedly people and groups in our communities who are easy to ignore. It is not just a simple matter of tackling poverty, although that would go a long way towards tackling health inequalities.

My party is very sympathetic to the idea of a universal basic income, but we are not convinced that we can introduce it without the full powers of independence. As a result, we are exploring ways of assuring people in Scotland that they can have a dignified level of income, although I realise that that falls short of a universal basic income.

I think that you can see our commitment to such an approach in, for example, our handling of school lunch provision during the pandemic. It was quickly recognised that we should get money into the pockets of parents so that they could feed their children adequately. That was brought in all over Scotland quite quickly, because that is the best thing that can be done to support families and the most effective way of ensuring that children are well fed.

Michael Kellet will say a little more about the cross-Government work that he is involved in.

We already work closely with sports governing bodies and a whole load of stakeholders. Sportscotland is the organisation that does much of the work on the ground. I am a huge rugby fan. We were unable to go to rugby matches because of the pandemic—in fact, Sunday was the first time since the pandemic started that there has been a full-capacity crowd at Murrayfield. There have been challenges in delivering sport, from huge elite-level events down to making grass-roots sport Covid safe. We have had to consider what rules and regulations need to be in place to ensure that Covid transmission does not occur while people are playing sport. We have worked incredibly closely with sports bodies over the past 20 months and I am absolutely sure that that will help us.

You are quite right that sport has the power to reach people and to motivate and inspire them in a way that me telling them stuff does not. We are pretty keen to use that power to tackle all the big problems. For example, over the course of the 26th United Nations climate change conference of the parties—COP26—I will have a couple of interesting meetings and collaborations about how we can use sport to tackle climate change.