Meeting of the Parliament 18 February 2015
As I told Mark McDonald last night, no one would have had to resort to putting in freedom of information requests if the Government had been open and transparent in the first place.
The health secretary must look at the duplicity of social unavailability hidden in waiting times. I expect that the new period of transparency that she has announced will bring that to an end. I hope that she will address that.
If Scotland is to have the most transparent health service in the world, does the Scottish Government plan to match the transparency of the Scottish Ambulance Service, which updates its performance figures on its website every 15 minutes?
We have not yet heard whether the cabinet secretary intends to publish figures on delayed discharge, the tackling of which she has called her greatest priority, and which we agree is the biggest challenge in our health service. I am surprised that she has not included delayed discharge figures in the transparency project, but she might be able to clear that up.
When the cabinet secretary publishes the figures, will she do so with the same openness and accountability as the Scottish Ambulance Service is demonstrating? Will we be able to find out, hour by hour, how many patients have been discharged, how many beds are occupied and how many are unoccupied? Will we be able to find out how the patient flow through our hospitals is operating throughout the day and on each day of the week? That might sound fanciful but, if we take the aspiration of full openness and accountability to its logical conclusion, it makes absolute sense and should be exactly what we are aspiring to in our most important public service in Scotland.
An international report published by McKinsey has concluded that transparency is one of the most powerful drivers of healthcare improvement. It cites as a powerful example the publication of data on Canadian hospitals. Within a few months of the data’s release, the average length of stay decreased by more than 30 per cent, and the number of unexpected readmissions declined by more than 20 per cent. If data publication could have a similar effect on delayed discharges in Scotland, what a radical improvement that would be.
A study published by The New England Journal of Medicine has shown that public data reporting is as effective an incentive as financial rewards are in convincing providers to improve their clinical performance. None of the NHS staff I have spoken to has any problem with data publication; indeed, openness and transparency are as much in the interests of our hard-working NHS staff as they are in the interests of patients.
If the international evidence is to be taken at face value, the Scottish Government has created an incredible opportunity this week by setting up the website and the project.