NHS ‘is hurtling over a precipice’ warns top doctor
Shocking verdict on 10 yrs of SNP ‘mismanagment’
SCOTLAND’S NHS is ‘hurtling over a precipice’ after being starved of cash for a decade under the SNP, the country’s former lead cancer clinician has claimed.
Dr Anna Gregor accused the SNP of ‘pork-barrel politics of the highest order’ in a withering attack on its record on health.
She also accused the Scottish Government of failing to pass on extra funding it receives as a result of increased investment in the NHS south of the Border.
Opposition politicians said her comments expose ‘a decade of mismanagement’ by the SNP since it came to power in 2007.
Dr Gregor, who was awarded a CBE after leading Scotland’s cancer strategy, said: ‘The main problem for me is that until about ten years ago we could have put the NHS on a sustainable footing.
‘Ten years ago we didn’t have a 25 per cent vacancy rate in senior clinical staff. We didn’t have budget shortfalls. We didn’t have such a demoralised staff.
‘We can’t get people to come here. The politicians are being extremely disingenuous when they say we want a health service fit for the 21st century.
‘They are doing nothing to make that happen, in fact quite the opposite. They are stopping things from happening.’
NHS spending north of the Border, at about £12.2billion a year, accounts for about 40 per cent of the Scottish budget.
In England, health spending has increased by 9 per cent between 2011-12 and 2015-16. However, in Scotland it has grown by only 3.4 per cent.
Dr Gregor, who retired three years ago, said: ‘We are hurtling over a precipice with everyone pretending it is going to be all right – and it won’t be.
‘If you have a health service tightly controlled by politicians then you have additional complexity in this already messy system, which is short-termism and pork-barrel politics of the highest order.’
She said that cuts are blamed on Westminster but added that ‘Barnett consequentials’ received because of investment in England are not passed on.
Dr Gregor said: ‘In real terms, the NHS has been starved of cash under the SNP.
‘They say the main budget has been protected but they are actually expecting efficiency savings and they are not putting in additional resources which should be coming through under Barnett and were being put in under Labour.’
Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour’s health spokesman, said: ‘This is an extraordinary intervention by Scotland’s former lead cancer clinician, and exposes the impact of a decade of SNP mismanagement on our NHS.
‘For someone of Dr Gregor’s standing to criticise the Nationalists’ running of the NHS like this is serious and cannot be dismissed by Nicola Sturgeon.
‘As Dr Gregor has highlighted, a decade of SNP mismanagement has created a staffing crisis in our NHS.’
The Scottish Government said it is committing an additional £327million to health boards, ‘including passing on of all resource consequentials, taking NHS funding to a record high and delivering £176million more than inflation this year’.
A spokesman added: ‘This clearly reflects our commitment to protect the NHS with record levels of investment.’
Comment – Page 16
‘Pork-barrel politics’