SNP caught Apping over NHS Scotland health care technology - Sue Webber
It’s rare I’m in agreement with a Labour figurehead, but UK health secretary Wes Streeting’s description of First Minster John Swinney as an “analogue politician in the digital age” could not be more appropriate.
It might be a bit rich coming from a UK Labour minister whose government’s idea of reforming public services is to reform public sector workers’ wages upwards by unaffordable amounts without any improvements in productivity, but in referring to the SNP Government’s pathetic attempts to deliver an NHS Scotland app he has a point.
The NHS England app might not be brilliant, but at least they’ve got one, allowing users to book and manage appointments, order repeat prescriptions, access health records and register organ donation permissions all in one place on a smart phone.
It was launched in 2019 and now it’s set to be upgraded to become a “doctor in your pocket,” with a target of 2028 for a full rollout.
But of course, rather than copy the technology from NHS England, as usual the SNP wasn’t going to follow anything from the south and decided it knew better. So, it set about reinventing the wheel and having announced its own version would be ready in 2023 it’s depressingly predictable we still have nothing.
It was, therefore, with equally predictable aplomb, but the customary extraordinary lack of self-awareness, that Scottish health secretary Neil Gray announced in April that such an app would revolutionise the patient access to services, as if that wasn’t already apparent from countries like England and France where systems were already up and running.
Thanks to questions raised by my colleague Stephen Kerr MSP, we now know that a staggering £17 million is being spent on the NHS Scotland version and a trial version won’t be launched until next year.
They have already burned their way through £5.6 million with little to show for it and on the off chance it does go live next year, the trial will only be in Lanarkshire, and even then only for dermatology.
This might be a game-changer if you’re an acne sufferer from Airdrie or live with eczema in East Kilbride ─ if it actually works ─ but for the rest of us there will be no benefit.
For the full roll-out we must wait until 2030, when NHS England’s app will have been on its second version for two years.
What’s even more remarkable is that private sector companies in Scotland are developing tech-driven health systems which already produce results. One is My Way Digital Health, spun out of Dundee University and which has developed an app to help diabetes sufferers manage their condition.
It’s been used in some NHS boards in England and is being rolled out across the Middle East. A non-executive director is Angus McCann, a computing industry veteran who is also a non-executive director at NHS Lothian and chairs its Finance and Resources Committee, so the connections are there for NHS Scotland to tap into proven expertise.
But once again, the SNP government is a laughingstock and judging by those ferries ─ one still being built and the other one only just back in service after cracks were found in its hull ─ it will be years before NHS Scotland’s app delivers anything at all except another illustration of SNP minsters’ false promises.