Meeting of the Parliament 13 March 2025
I am pleased to open for the Labour Party in this debate. In an age of technological marvels—from artificial intelligence to identifying cancers earlier and advanced robotics that can turn what were once impossible surgical procedures into routine day cases—it is clear that innovation is vital for the national health service and for our wider population’s long-term health and prosperity. However, when we look across the past decade or so at innovation and who is truly leading the field, I am afraid that the Scottish Government, given its leadership of the national health service, can be considered something of a laggard by international standards. For example, we are told that we can expect the full roll-out of the NHS digital front door over the next five years, yet Estonia—a European country with less than a third of Scotland’s population—has already pioneered digital healthcare, embracing digitisation of its healthcare system as early as 2008.
We are told that the Government is building partnerships between itself and healthcare professionals, universities and technologists in a so-called triple helix of innovation, which the health secretary referred to, but, to an extent, that has always existed in this country. It seems that the Government is only announcing something that is already long established from when this country pioneered diagnostic ultrasound, back in the 1950s, for example. The test, truly, is how we are delivering improved at-scale patient outcomes and how we are achieving productivity enhancements across the healthcare system. There is huge unmet potential across the national health service.