A dithering Mavis can’t heal the ills of our NHS
IF MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is Walter the Softy from the Beano, then our vacillating, dithering Health Secretary Shona Robison must be Mavis Wilton from Coronation Street.
The latest health crisis involves NHS Tayside, which pauchled from a charity fund – intended mainly to buy toys for children’s wards and to freshen up day rooms – to fund an IT system.
It’s a golden rule that such funds – created by generous Scots, often as a simple act of gratitude for treatment they or their family have received – are inviolable and most certainly not to be raided for day-to-day spending.
Miss Robison, forever ‘consulting with experts and stakeholders’ and ‘learning lessons’ and ‘bringing forward proposals’ instead of doing anything, leapt to ensure the stable door is now firmly bolted behind the vanished horse.
She has taken direct emergency control of NHS Tayside, which means a hit squad will run the thing while Mavis – sorry, Shona – fiddles with her pearls and looks all surprised.
Miss Robison always does a doubletake when confronted with problems: ‘Goodness! What’s been going on here while my back has been turned?’
I used to think it was a distraction technique but maybe the task of keeping an eye on those pesky health boards is simply beyond the Health Minister’s meagre abilities.
This latest crisis built over years in her own back yard – she is MSP for a Dundee constituency smack within NHS Tayside’s bounds.
WE cannot go on like this, with the NHS becoming a bottomless pit for taxpayers’ cash. Audit Scotland said health has a budget of around £13billion each year, equivalent to 43 per cent of the overall Scottish Budget in 2016-17. It beggars belief that hesitant Miss Robison is entrusted with the most expensive, expansive and arguably important job in Cabinet.
The Nationalists style themselves guardians of the NHS but they have one idea: throw in more taxpayers’ cash.
Two relatives of mine recently had major operations in one of the country’s newest and shiniest hospitals. Both ended up with stories of how hard individual staff work but also of bureaucratic mis-steps – and both contracted hospital-acquired infections.
Sheer bad luck? Or an indication of politicians and a system beholden to the idea that spending more and more on something, anything, instead of implementing reform is a plan.
New hospitals and machines that go beep are lovely, but where are the staff to run them? The SNP frets about where we will source fruit-pickers post-Brexit. What about the GPs, physiotherapists, radiographers, we are already crying out for? More cash, even ring-fenced money, is not the answer.
In Ireland, a so-called hypothecated tax dedicated to health has failed to turn the fortunes of the shambolic partstate, part-private service. What is needed there and here is thorough reform of management and innovation instead of repetition of failed old ideas.
Do we need 14 health boards? Doesn’t NHS Tayside show current oversight is not working? Could we keep a better eye on fewer, bigger boards and save money for once?
Mavis is no longer in Coronation Street. Perhaps the NHS Tayside scandal – there really is no other word for it – means our weak-aswater Health Secretary should no longer be in Cabinet.