Meeting of the Parliament 10 June 2015
I and other Labour members have approached today’s debate in a conciliatory way, hoping to reach a consensus on the way in which we take forward the debate on our national health service. Last week, we were warned by the health professionals who spoke up so articulately that there is no place for political point scoring in this debate.
In that spirit, I drafted a motion that I hoped the whole chamber could unite behind. Indeed, it was designed for the whole chamber to unite behind. It acknowledges the scale of the challenge, it reflects the hard messages coming from our senior doctors and nurses in Scotland, and it gives credit to the cabinet secretary for the constructive and positive tone that she has struck in response to them, especially in Monday’s newspapers. I therefore have to express my disappointment that the cabinet secretary has sought to disregard the whole of our motion in the way that she has, replacing it with her own words which, on my reading, make largely the same point as the original motion. She will no doubt set out her rationale for that in her speech, but I do not feel that her amendment has got today’s debate off to the best start.
Delivering the healthcare that we want for the people of Scotland in a time of straitened budgets and with an ageing population presents us with one of the country’s biggest challenges. We recognise the heroics performed every day by the hard-working staff at every level of NHS Scotland and in our care services, keeping us safe and well in trying circumstances, and we thanked them for that in our motion. However, the people who are working on the front line deserve more than warm words from those in Parliament. They deserve the resources that they need to do their job, and at the very least they deserve to be listened to when they tell us that serious change is needed to preserve and sustain—that was the key word last week—our NHS.
Last week, an independent report commissioned by the British Medical Association’s Scottish consultants committee illustrated the full scale of the challenge. The report said that the balance had tipped too far towards financial decisions dominating over medical need, and that that was linked to
“politicians’ promises to the general public to meet increasing demands from an aging population for a better quality of healthcare without being able to fully resource such promises”.
In its conclusion, the BMA’s report stated that it had
“detected a strong note of pessimism, even fatalism, over how the healthcare system could be improved for the benefit of all stakeholders, without substantial improvements in resources allocated to the NHS in Scotland. These feelings, if left unaddressed, could have major consequences for patient care and the overall sustainability of NHS Scotland.”
That was a wake-up call, indeed, but it was followed just 24 hours later by another, this time from the medical and nursing royal colleges speaking for the first time with a single voice, in the report “Building a more sustainable NHS in Scotland: Health professions lead the call for action”. They say that funding is unable to keep up with the pressures on the NHS, that tinkering around the edges is not the answer and that it is time for
“a genuine public debate on change”.