Countdown to election day
On May 6, residents in South Lanarkshire will go to the polls to elect their MSPs for the next five years.
Over the next three weeks, we will be speaking to each of the candidates about what is important to them and to their prospective constituents. In Rutherglen, Labour, the SNP, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives have all put forward candidates.
Incumbent Clare Haughey is once again the SNP’s candidate after she was first elected in 2016.
Since June 2018, she has been the Scottish Government’s minister for Mental Health.
Labour candidate James Kelly has been an MSP since 2007 and is looking to win back the seat he represented between 2007 and 2016. He has been a Glasgow region MSP since 2016.
Conservative candidate Lynne Nailon is currently a councillor for Hamilton South, while standing for the Liberal Democrats is Sheila Thomson.
This week we have asked them what they would do for health in the region if they were elected.
Class act Education will figure large
Restoring the NHS, and Scotland’s health, will be the key to Scotland’s recovery, but we cannot go back to the way things worked before.
The pandemic has reminded us all how valuable our NHS is.
It was because we wanted to protect our NHS that we came together as a country to fight Covid-19 and save lives.
Largely thanks to the efforts of people across communities like Rutherglen and Cambuslang, we kept our NHS from becoming overwhelmed, but not without sacrifices.
Even before the pandemic, the SNP government was failing to meet its own 12-week treatment time guarantee in our local health boards.
Many people across this constituency had experienced unacceptable wait times before, now that number is almost double what it was in 2019.
There are also hundreds of thousands of people potentially missing from waiting lists, who we must race to identify when services fully restart.
This is why Scottish Labour is advocating to get cancer treatment and screenings back on track, so that the 7000 missing cancer diagnoses can be identified and given treatment.
Mental health services were struggling long before the pandemic, the government have never met their 18-week appointment guarantee.
Scottish Labour wants a new ‘referral and triage’service to allow services to operate within their targets and reduce waiting lists, as well as a dedicated mental health worker in every GP service. Given the pressures of the last year on our wellbeing, the recovery of mental health services must be a priority.
Scottish Labour is the only party with a clear plan that sets out the immediate steps that must be taken to recovery for health and care services and put them on a path to be stronger for the future.