Meeting of the Parliament 14 January 2015
I absolutely welcome the investment, and I want to acknowledge that since our Parliament reopened in 1999, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP have been on common ground in seeking to sustain a public service model for our devolved NHS that is based on collaboration and co-operation and not on competition. In June, the Conservatives joined us in agreeing that principle. The cross-party agreement on principles for the way forward is extremely welcome.
Since 2007, demands on the Scottish NHS have increased. The number of elderly people has increased from 400,000 to 500,000 over that period, and many of those half million people will have complex morbidity. There have been advancements in medical diagnostics, and there are ever-more expensive medicines that require specialist administration, and new treatments. That is why the SNP’s oft-repeated defence, whereby it compares staffing levels under Labour in 2007 with levels in 2014, is not only irrelevant but nonsensical. It is critical that we have more staff if we are to meet the greater demand, as Malcolm Chisholm will say in his speech.
The two main drivers of improvement in patient experience since 2001 have been targets and the patient safety programme. Both policies are important and welcome. There are targets for the time from referral to treatment, diagnostics, accident and emergency, cancer diagnosis and treatment, and delayed discharge, many of which were instituted by Labour. In each area, we began from a low base, and progress has been made under both Administrations. In many cases, when the initial target was reached, a new and more demanding target was set. That approach has transformed patient experience.
Comparing the targets that Labour had met by 2007 with what is now being achieved may make good soundbites that are oft repeated, but doing so is, frankly, infantile. Any comparisons should show whether there were year-on-year improvements, and until 2012 that was the case under both Administrations. The problem is that, in many instances—excluding the new targets in child and adolescent mental health services and in psychological treatments—we have been going backwards since 2012.