Meeting of the Parliament 16 January 2025
I start, as others have, by congratulating my colleague Tim Eagle on bringing this hugely important matter to the chamber.
We are all aware of the pressures that the Scottish health service is under and the incredible work that our healthcare professionals do in such a difficult environment. Those pressures are magnified when trying to deliver healthcare in rural areas. There is much that we could discuss in the debate, and much already has been discussed, but I want to focus on the part that technology could and should play in the health service, especially as a major solution for rural healthcare delivery.
We need a health service that effectively delivers healthcare across our country, and that delivers an environment that supports our healthcare professionals. We need to recognise that delivering effective and efficient care will require different approaches and adaptations for rural and urban settings. The development and adoption of technology into the health service in the United Kingdom has lagged way behind the rest of the world, and Scotland lags behind the rest of the UK. The inability to share data across health boards and between primary and secondary healthcare, pharmacy and the third sector seriously hampers our ability to deliver effective and efficient healthcare.
However, the problem that we are trying to solve is one of time. How do we give our healthcare professionals more time to deliver healthcare, as opposed to swamping them with administration and red tape? First, we need a Scotland-wide technology platform with a basic architecture that allows for interoperability between health boards and facets of healthcare, with different and appropriate levels of access. Once that is in place, we will have the ability to take out duplication that occurs in back office administration across health boards. We will also have the ability to share good practice and access patient records directly, and once that is in place, we can start to look at how we take services to the people, rather than insist that people come to the services in all cases, as was raised by Tim Eagle.
We have the ability to deliver scans, pharmacy and vaccinations, as was highlighted by Fergus Ewing, and even the ability to deliver doctors’ surgeries, from mobile units. With a basic communication and collaboration platform, those mobile units could be directed to any hotspots, and a workforce plan for rural communities could be easily established. Tim Eagle highlighted the specific problems of small teams and staff shortages. If we layer AI on top of that, diagnosis from scans can be almost immediate. While we are on the subject, imagine being able to remotely access consultants from a mobile doctors’ surgery. Multilayered access to healthcare currently takes months of appointment making, with the patient having to travel from pillar to post. That is especially relevant for people who have to take a ferry or drive hundreds of miles for a 15-minute appointment.
Those options are not fantasy or science fiction—they have been available for years. That is how we deliver access to healthcare for all. It is how we create a rural healthcare system that encourages people to stay in a rural setting, and it is how we reduce the intolerable strain on our health service.
As the old saying goes, the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Continuing to increase investment in the health service without a long-term plan, as Audit Scotland said in its report on the SNP health service, is unsustainable. Change the delivery mechanism. Give more time to our healthcare professionals to do what they do best. Otherwise, all the Scottish Government is doing is continuing to manage the decline of healthcare in this country, which is felt ever more acutely in our rural communities.
17:59