Hansard

It is perfectly fair that the health secretary highlighted those examples. The question is how quickly we can disseminate, integrate and rapidly roll those things out into operational improvements. That is where we could see significant improvement on a number of fronts.

One example in the NHS that is very promising but still tantalisingly underutilised is robot-assisted surgery. We have already achieved the breakthrough milestone of 10,000 robot-assisted procedures in Scotland, and, in the NHS Ayrshire and Arran health board area, more than 250 women have benefited from minimally invasive robotic surgery in the past year alone. That has transformed outcomes. They walk out the door within hours of the surgery, whereas previously it required convalescence for weeks.

That is testament to the skill of the NHS staff—the surgeons and clinicians—who are supporting those roll-outs and improvements. However, there is still underutilisation, because the bureaucratic inertia of the NHS means that it is not fully geared up to deal with such innovation and roll it out to its full potential. That is where the Government needs to push it further. Before we congratulate ourselves, we need to recognise that Scotland could be much better at that, and we should hold everyone to account for that improvement.

We need to look at international standards. It is not good enough just to meet the global standards of a decade ago and think that that is sufficient. That is why Labour’s amendment recognises that, for the past 18 years—nearly two decades—Scotland has been stuck following a technological innovation pathway rather than leading that pathway. Despite our world-leading research hospitals and universities, we often fail to turn research that is developed in Scotland into action. We must follow the lead of other nations and companies that are developed in other countries.

Even when we show promise, such as in the development of Touch Bionics, which was one of the first spin-outs of the NHS in 2002 and was sold off in 2016 to an Icelandic company, we do not build it into a unicorn—a major international technology company that could be headquartered and led from Scotland rather than from Iceland. We should do more to harness the Techscaler programme and make strategic investments that benefit the nation and its prosperity.

We are exasperated to hear NHS staff talk about computer update timescales in terms of decades, not years. Even basic things such as wi-fi and mobile signals in hospitals are so bad that modern smartphones cannot be used. The Scottish National Party came to power before the iPhone was invented, and it seems that, as far as the NHS goes, it has still not been invented. That is why staff in the NHS still rely on pagers—technology that has been scrapped, with the vendors keeping it in service purely because the NHS still needs it. The NHS would fall over otherwise. The default mode of communication is paper-based prescribing, and the goal of e-prescriptions is seemingly unachievable for a Government characterised by its satisfaction with analogue processes.

There needs to be much more improvement. We know that delays in the sharing of data between health providers are slowing down patients’ diagnoses. Those delays are also leading to duplication of work and are wasting NHS staff time and slowing patients’ treatment plans. The lack of an NHS app means that patients are often unaware of their own medical records. The lack of interconnectedness across the healthcare system in Scotland is not just hypothetical; it directly worsens the healthcare outcomes of many thousands of NHS patients and is acting as a drag on national productivity. We know that the equivalent of one in eight people in Scotland is on a waiting list for some sort of procedure. That is a huge national lag. The NHS workforce is equivalent to the population of one of Scotland’s biggest cities, Dundee. If that workforce is not efficiently harnessed, it affects national productivity. We already know about the pressures on our social security system as a result of chronic illness and that, if people are unable to access the workplace, it affects our national finances.

We could have a virtuous circle rather than a vicious cycle. The pandemic shows that, when Scotland is serious about its national mission to adapt and innovate in healthcare, it can bring everyone with it and mobilise the country to achieve public health objectives. Now is the time to show that Scotland—the birthplace of the enlightenment and the pioneer of so many technologies, such as diagnostic ultrasound, which has transformed the world—can, once again, lead the world in healthcare innovation.

I hope that Parliament will support the amendment in my name.

I move amendment S6M-16777.2, to insert at end:

“; regrets that the Scottish National Party administration has, after almost 18 years in office, allowed Scotland’s NHS to lag behind in adopting innovation, with end-to-end paperless and e-prescribing policies undelivered and dated medical diagnostics equipment still in use, and calls on the Scottish Government to move Scotland’s NHS and social care sector from analogue working to the digital age, starting by creating a shared care record system and empowering patients through an NHS app.”