Meeting of the Parliament 23 November 2022
When I have met chief executives and the chairs of health boards, not one of them has ever floated the idea of charging patients. If they did that, I would, to be frank, tell them that that is not up for discussion under this Government.
I say to Jackie Baillie and Scottish Labour, who have brought to the chamber this serious debate on a serious issue—which was not given any serious consideration by Jackie Baillie in a speech that was, to be frank, ludicrous—that we should start by thanking all our primary care teams: not just our general practitioners, those who work in reception and our multidisciplinary staff, but primary care staff across the piece. I thank every one of them.
On Jackie Baillie’s concerns about the founding principles of the NHS and thanking our healthcare workforce, I give a categorical assurance that our Scottish NHS will never be sold off into private hands under this Administration.
The Government holds true to the founding principles of the NHS and Nye Bevan’s vision of patient care that is free at the point of need. We should be judged on our track record on that, which is, of course, one of abolishing prescription charges, removing dental charges for young people and continuing to fund free eye tests. Let us have it recorded that this Government will keep the NHS in Scotland publicly owned, publicly operated and free at the point of use.
Jackie Baillie decries the Government having to reprofile health spending to combat sky-high inflation due to Conservative mismanagement of the economy or to afford record high pay deals. There is one place that I would love to be able to save money: in the £250 million that Scottish people are still paying for Labour’s disastrous private finance initiative and public-private partnership projects to build hospitals in Scotland. Jackie Baillie was only ever trusted in government for the briefest of periods, but she should take the opportunity to apologise to every person in Scotland that they are still paying the price for Labour’s privatisation of our NHS.
Our general practice and primary care services have been impacted by Brexit, the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, but we will continue to invest in our multidisciplinary teams. Jackie Baillie seemed to talk them down, but 3,220 multidisciplinary staff and professionals have been recruited since 2018. Therefore, when people walk into their general practice, not only are they likely to be able to see general practitioners who do a phenomenal job, but they may well be able to see physiotherapists, advanced nurse practitioners and a multitude of multidisciplinary staff across the piece. Those individuals are there not only to give the best possible service to the public that they see, but to ensure that the incredible workload in general practices is spread more evenly.