Meeting of the Parliament 02 November 2016
There are significant challenges facing our beloved NHS. Some of them are very serious and will require new ways of working, some will require creativity and all will need serious levels of funding to solve them. However, they are in no way unique to Scotland. We are facing budget challenges, an ageing population and huge price hikes for essential life-extending medicines, but those same challenges face many countries such as ours right now; indeed the same challenges currently face the rest of the United Kingdom. That has led the Auditor General for Scotland, Caroline Gardner, to comment:
“We know that many of the pressures that we are seeing in Scotland apply across the UK and elsewhere. Scotland’s performance stands up well against that of the rest of the UK.”
This year, the NHS budget is £12.2 billion, which amounts to 40 per cent of the Scottish Government’s budget. That is a serious commitment by the Government to the NHS. By the end of this session of Parliament, health funding will be at least £500 million more than it would be with inflation-only increases, and that was a manifesto commitment that only the SNP had.
That level of financial commitment has allowed overall staff levels to be at their highest ever, with over 138,400 whole-time-equivalent staff as of March this year, which is an increase of 11,000 since the SNP came to power. There are more staff across the board, from nurses and midwives to general practitioners, paramedics and oncologists. That level of financial commitment is made all the more remarkable when set against the fact that the money that is available to the Scottish Government has been rapidly dwindling.