Meeting of the Parliament 04 June 2024
—which is our vision for the NHS, the member will be able to understand our 26-page policy document.
To achieve that, our country will need to truly embrace innovation and change—plus take the strain off our health service and its staff. In that way, we can maintain them and universal healthcare as we know it.
To start with, we want to strengthen primary care so that practices can handle the volume of demand and carry out the types of clinical interventions that can safely and practically be delivered in the community. That includes backing our community pharmacies, optometrists, audiology services, physiotherapists and link workers, all of whom have expertise that can support community-based care. That should have happened under the GP contract, but the SNP has, as with all things, broken its promise and failed to deliver. To achieve that, we would reprioritise resources. In plain speak, we would radically increase the percentage of the NHS budget that funds primary care.
Our vision of a modern and efficient health service also embraces innovation. We want to see clinicians, university researchers, data scientists, artificial intelligence technologists, Government and industry in lockstep to develop monitoring, diagnostics and advanced therapies. We need to use technology to predict problems, because if we can predict we can prevent—and so protect people. We must also deploy technology to reduce inefficiencies.