Meeting of the Parliament 10 June 2015
The challenge of matching NHS resources to demand for healthcare is tough everywhere, and nowhere more so than in NHS Grampian. I know the service well, not only as a local MSP and as former health minister, but, first and foremost, as a local resident. Like most service users, my starting point is my immense gratitude to all the people who provide the service—and to those who created the NHS in the first place two generations ago.
Ten years ago, it was easy to hold up NHS Grampian as an exemplar of how health services should be delivered. Patients with routine ailments presented to primary care, not to A and E, and hospitals could concentrate on acute care. Budgets were tight then as they are tight now, but NHS Grampian was best in class when it came to getting value for money from the public pound.
Since then, the challenges have only grown. The population in Grampian has gone up faster than in the rest Scotland and more people are living longer and with a greater range of healthcare needs. Resources have gone up too, but not at the same pace. The NHS Scotland resource allocation committee recommended changes to reflect population growth in 2007, but those changes have not yet been implemented in full.
At the time of NHS Grampian’s annual review in January, ministers provided an additional uplift of more than £11 million, in the hope of reducing the shortfall to some £8 million, or 1 per cent of what the NRAC formula then said the board’s funding should be. The Government’s good intentions were welcome, but when the NRAC formula was recalculated to take population growth into account, the difference between NHS Grampian’s funding allocation and NRAC parity had gone back up to more than 2 per cent, or £17 million, for the current financial year. I know that that is not what ministers intended and that they were indeed seeking to get Grampian’s funding to within 1 per cent of parity. I hope that they will try again, and I would urge them next time to allow for the predicted change in population in advance, so that the gap really can close to no more than 1 per cent in the next financial year.