Meeting of the Parliament 10 June 2015
I welcomed the text of Jenny Marra’s motion when I read it after it was published last night, and I welcome the generally consensual and positive speech that she made. That approach is welcome. It is quite clear that the approach is one that other people are taking up. As outlined in the cabinet secretary’s amendment, many patients, members of the public and professionals are recognising that, across the board, we need an honest conversation about the long-term future of our NHS, to ensure that it can meet the considerable challenges of the future.
We often talk about those challenges, and it sometimes concerns me that when we talk about them, they all sound hugely difficult. However, some of them are extremely positive because many of them result from people living longer and from the advent of much improved medical solutions right across the board.
It is also very important that in the discussion, we should not lose sight of the considerable progress that our NHS has made in recent years or the high-quality care that is delivered every single day by the vast majority of doctors, nurses, auxiliaries, assistants, ancillary staff and, of course, administrators, who help the wheels to turn.
We have excellence to build on. The cabinet secretary outlined record funding and staffing and the other improvements that are being made in moving towards the 2020 vision that has been agreed for our health service. That vision for health and social care has prompted the fundamental shift towards more preventative healthcare and care that allows people to remain in their own homes, which is where, in general, they want to be. This week is carers week in Scotland, and we should always remember that part of the integrated care approach is about respect for the needs of carers, of whom there are so many.
In my constituency of East Kilbride, an award-winning NHS Lanarkshire integrated care team is doing sterling work, but we still have a long way to go. There are issues to be tackled, involving bed blocking, home care packages and better working between departments within health boards—for example, between primary care, acute care and mental health services. We also need better working between health boards and local authorities. That has begun, of course, with the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act 2014, but it is not easy.
Our public institutions are renowned for having a fortress mentality that can lead to intransigence. I do not say that lightly; I say it following years of parliamentary experience on various committees. I do not have time to go into it all but I remember being on the Finance Committee in the previous parliamentary session when we did a very in-depth inquiry into preventative spending, and it was striking just how intransigent some of our public bodies were when it came to looking after their own budgets.
If we can get beyond the silo mentality that Nanette Milne spoke of—the silos that exist both within and between our public bodies—surely we can get beyond the silo mentality among political parties. I am really heartened by what I have heard in the chamber today. I hope that Jenny Marra and her colleagues take my comment in the spirit that is intended—I hope that this finally marks a move away from the “SNP bad” approach that seems to have dominated Labour thinking for quite a time. Successfully managing the NHS in public hands requires agreement across the parties, as well as across institutions, about some of the key priorities and the key principles.
The SNP Government has made it clear that we agree with the fundamental principle that NHS services should be free at the point of need, and the Labour Party has made it clear that it agrees with that too. There may be discussion about what that actually means but it is a basic, fundamental principle that we can all get behind.
I make a plea to Jenny Marra to spread her approach more widely across her party because our recent experience in East Kilbride has not been encouraging in that respect. For example, her colleagues in East Kilbride condemned us for repairing a seriously rundown health centre; then they condemned us for deciding to build a new health centre; now they are giving us a really hard time for daring to have artworks on the walls of the new centre, now that it has been built. East Kilbride Labour seems to hanker after the days when all public buildings looked the same and all NHS buildings had walls that were painted green and cream. However, on a national level, I think that we are moving beyond that.
I am also pleased that, at a national level, we accept that a new consensual approach to targets is necessary. Over the years, we have not always looked at targets in a helpful way. I remember many targets being abandoned by previous Governments, and other targets coming back again. I would like continual quantitative and qualitative monitoring, so that we constantly strive for improvement. I hope that we can, through the consensus that I have spoken about, fulfil that aim for our health service.
15:35