Meeting of the Parliament 02 March 2016
I thank Jackson Carlaw for his intervention, but I was more implying his disagreement with our proposal for the extra 1p on income tax.
Labour, the Liberals and now the Scottish National Party have made education a priority for any additional revenue, for right and proper reasons. However, given the challenges and problems that exist in our health service, are we spending enough on our NHS and care services? The evidence that is before us suggests that we are not.
We all share the starting point that health spending should be protected in the Scottish budget. The Scottish Parliament spends a third of the budget on our health service, which is a considerable sum, but we still face persistent and seemingly intransigent problems with ill health, poverty and disease in Scotland. I am sure that every MSP is being told that the general practitioner surgery in their local area is struggling to recruit doctors. Lists are being closed to patients, health boards are stepping in to run general practice and the experts tell us that the very existence of general practice is under threat. In my home city of Dundee, a doctor’s surgery in one of the most deprived communities in Scotland is teetering on the brink of survival as the recruitment crisis strangles GP provision, threatening the very existence of a GP practice in that local area.
Recruitment is a huge challenge that health boards and the Government are grappling with. Posts across the country remain unfilled—many for months—with no sign of them being filled in the near future and services are having to be altered to ensure patient safety as a result. The Government’s cut in training places for doctors is coming home to roost in our health service. It was a short-sighted decision and I hope that that mistake will not be made again.
We have a huge number of doctors training in this country who then leave to go abroad. There is no guarantee that the trends of previous years, in which doctors have returned to our shores to serve the NHS, will continue. That is one of the biggest recruitment challenges, and it will need some clever thinking over the next session of Parliament as we all know the effect that it is having on our local services.
It is now a full year since Shona Robison made the pledge to abolish delayed discharge from our hospitals within a year. Sadly, she has not been able to achieve that. According to the statistics that were released a couple of weeks ago, there has been a welcome improvement in accident and emergency waiting times, but we still see more than 50 patients waiting for more than eight hours at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital in Glasgow.