Meeting of the Parliament 03 June 2026 [Draft]
I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate on protecting and renewing our NHS. I congratulate Angela Constance on her appointment as the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Care.
We are truly privileged to live in a nation where there is an unequivocal commitment to the continued provision of a publicly owned NHS that is free at the point of use. We use the phrase “free at the point of use” all the time, but it is not until we suddenly need the NHS that we fully realise just how precious that principle is.
Over the past year, I have witnessed the NHS at first hand as I have supported a family member through a year of cancer treatment. Like so many others who have been in that position, I have nothing but gratitude and admiration for the consultants, surgeons and nursing staff, all of whom have been intimately involved in our lives over the past 12 months. The care and treatment have been exemplary.
Some MSPs might talk glibly about the need to move from a universal, rights-based system to an insurance-based system. I find that terrifying. I doubt that I would ever have earned enough money to ensure that we had sufficient insurance to cover the scale of the treatment that we have just received: scans, chemotherapy, community pharmacy, no less than four operations, intensive care, acute care and nursing care accompanying every intervention. Every single decision over the past year was based on medical need and patient care, not on our ability to pay the bill, whenever it was delivered. It was about care, not cost—and that is priceless.
Thankfully, the NHS is in safe hands. As the cabinet secretary clarified, the NHS in Scotland, under the SNP, will never be for sale. I am glad to report that the patient is on the road to recovery.
Our manifesto is packed with commitments to continue to invest in and protect the NHS. We are spending £22.5 billion this year; waiting lists and waiting times are coming down; and the numbers of operations, GPs and staff are going up. Over these first 100 days, we will deliver on the many key targets that we have listed in our “100 Days of a New SNP Government” document.
One of the things that I am most optimistic about is the shift to prevention and community-based care. Public Health Scotland says that, overall, around 20 per cent of our health is determined by access to the NHS. When we need help from the NHS, it is vital that it is there for us, as I have just testified, but the other 80 per cent of our health is shaped by our employment status, our prospects, our income—or lack of it—our living environment, our neighbourhood and the decisions that we make based on the options that we have.
From 2010, Westminster austerity caused a decline in life expectancy, and we now face a very big gap between a healthy life expectancy and an unhealthy life expectancy. In Dundee, a woman living in one of the least deprived communities can expect to live 26 years more of a healthy life than a woman living in one of the more deprived communities. That desperately needs our attention. Poverty, insecure work, poor living conditions and hopelessness take their toll.
Helping people to improve and maintain their health and to prevent illness is equally important. One service in Dundee that is doing just that for people with mental ill health is Hope Point, which is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week service provided by Penumbra with support from the Dundee health and social care partnership. No referral is needed. Anyone can drop in, phone or text and, even without an appointment, the peer supporters on duty will be there for you. As of yesterday, since its opening nearly three years ago, more than 2,700 people have been supported by the service. It has made more than 15,400 contacts with the public. Around 60 per cent of the contacts that Hope Point makes are between 6 pm and 8 am. Being there when people need help is vital, and peer-to-peer support is life changing. Hope Point provides us with a model that can be replicated across the whole of Scotland. I would be delighted to invite the cabinet secretary to Dundee to meet the staff and see the work that they are doing.
I cannot talk about health without acknowledging one of my heroes—and he should be one of Scotland’s huge heroes: John Boyd Orr, the pioneering Scottish scientist and nutritionist who became the first director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Boyd Orr wrote “Food, Health and Income” back in 1936—90 years ago. He was working in Glasgow and was shocked by the levels of rickets and poor health in the schools. He then trained as a doctor and made the link, in that document, between poverty, poor diet and ill health. He discovered back then that around one third of the population simply could not afford a healthy diet.
Everything that we can do to help people in Scotland to get access to good food is important. Boyd Orr always argued that we should prioritise the nutritional needs of women and their children, and we are doing that with all our work on best start grants and best start foods. He was instrumental in introducing school milk, before Mrs Thatcher took it away, and we are doing our bit in schools, with free school meals.
When we think about prevention, it is always worth asking: what would Boyd Orr do? He never lacked ambition. I think that he would give a wry smile if he were to look at our aims to link public health and the price of core food essentials, and I am sure that he would have a thing or two to say to the supermarkets about their public health responsibilities.
I fully support the motion and am glad to contribute to the debate. I hope that we get more innovative on prevention and community support.