Meeting of the Parliament 16 January 2025
I thank Tim Eagle for, as he said, giving us all the opportunity to raise important matters. I wish to focus, as I have intimated to the cabinet secretary, on one of them—namely, the forced removal of vaccination services from GPs in 2023.
Last spring, an infant in Highland died. No doubt, as is appropriate, the fatal accident inquiry will investigate the circumstances in due course. The family seeks total privacy: that must be respected. However, as the cabinet secretary knows, it is the belief of GPs who have been consulting, informing and advising me—notably, Dr Alastair Noble and Dr Adrian Baker from Nairn and, more recently, Dr Ross Jaffrey from Beauly—that the case arose because of lack of access to vaccination following the loss of provision of the service by local GPs.
That change was brought in in 2023. When I took up the case, I challenged whether it should take place at all. I have challenged Humza Yousaf, Michael Matheson, Neil Gray and the current and previous First Ministers, in the chamber, in meetings and, repeatedly, in letters. What has happened is that the GP contract has enforced removal of that service from GPs, despite the fact that three quarters of GPs in Highland voted against the contract.
Now, 90 per cent of GPs want to have the service back. I am informed by Dr Jaffrey in a paper that he provided recently—I have furnished the cabinet secretary with a copy of it—that the 10 per cent of GPs who do not want it back are largely members of a Highland health board practice who are, no doubt, taking their lead from NHS Highland.
There are many problems with that. There is cost—the old system cost roughly £1.5 million, and it is believed that the new system costs £6 million. If we extrapolate that across the whole of rural Scotland, it is a massive waste of money.
However, the cost is not as important as the harm. I think that we would all accept that. One of the truly utterly shocking facts is that details of who has and who has not received immunisation—whether it is for flu, measles, mumps and rubella, whooping cough or Covid—cannot be shared with GPs. Immunisation is done at centralised locations, and when they see a patient, GPs do not know whether the patient, particularly when the patient is child, has been immunised. As Dr Jaffrey pointed out in his recent paper, that is leading to a drop-off in immunisation rates. He said that they used to have a surge and do 60 per cent in October to get herd immunity up, but that has all gone. The facts are there in Ross Jaffrey’s report. I cannot go over them all, but the levels of immunisation in things such as—