Scottish NHS still under major pressure despite extra spending - Susan Dalgety
It’s official: Scotland’s NHS is broken. A report published a few days ago by Audit Scotland, the watchdog that ensures public money is used properly, says that the health service is “unsustainable”.
Despite increased spending and a huge rise in the number of people employed in the NHS since 2019, the report goes on to say it will be “extremely challenging” to reduce long waiting lists by the spring of 2026, as promised by the SNP government.
It showed that half of Scotland’s health boards have been forced to “borrow” cash from the government just to stay afloat.
And Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar revealed in Holyrood last week that in the last year alone Scots have been forced to spend £59 million of their own money on private treatment for cataracts and hip and knee replacements.
He said this breached “the founding principles of our NHS”, which are that healthcare should be free at the point of use, comprehensive and available to all, regardless of having the means to pay.
Next week, my husband will have an op to remove a basal cell carcinoma from his face.
Luckily, the operation is on the NHS, so he will only have to fork out for his taxi home, but he had to pay for a private consultation before getting a date for the op.
He first visited our GP six years ago, when he was told the strange spot below his right eye was “nothing”.
Eighteen months ago ago, after several long trips abroad in very sunny countries, the “spot” had grown dramatically in size and its texture had changed significantly.
“Oh, that’s a tumour, don’t worry its benign, but we need to get it out or it will keep growing,” he was told.
He was referred to a consultant but warned it would be months before he would be seen, and without a diagnosis he could not get the tumour removed.
Months went by, and sure enough the tumour kept growing. In desperation, my husband paid £200 for a private consultation with the same doctor he would have seen if he had waited another six months, only to be told what he already knew, that the tumour required surgery to remove it.
At long last, he had the precious diagnosis that meant he could move from the referral waiting list to the treatment one, but he had to pay for the privilege.
He was lucky, he could afford a couple of hundred pounds to speed up the process, but if he had needed a new hip, he would have had to put it on a credit card or suffer in agony for years.
The SNP has been in power for 18 years, during which time our health service has all but collapsed.
It is a lottery getting a GP appointment, and while English patients have been enjoying the benefits of an NHS app for six years, we will have to wait until 2030 before we have one that works.
If the party in power can’t run our most vital public service properly, then surely it is time we gave another set of politicians a chance. They couldn’t do any worse.