It's official: The Scottish Government has no vision to save the NHS

Patients knew our health service was in poor health, but the latest prognosis by auditors shows it is in a far worse state than that, writes Jackie Baillie.

Scotland’s NHS is directionless, risking patient safety and on the brink of breakdown, and that is official.

This has been Labour’s assessment of the SNP’s management of our health service over many years. But the annual report from the Auditor General, Scotland’s spending watchdog, on the state of our NHS is devastating.

The stark warning in the Audit Scotland 2023 report is that the health service is at breaking point. The Auditor General highlights how rising costs and demand have pushed the NHS to the brink with extreme overcrowding and long waiting times threatening patient safety.

The latest Audit Scotland report lays bare the challenges facing the NHS Scotland, both now and in the future, writes Jackie Baillie. Jeff Moore/PA Wire

The thousands of patients on waiting lists already knew this and both staff and patients can see how those working in the NHS are completely overstretched.

But the Audit Scotland report goes further. It accuses the Scottish government of failing to deliver a vision for the future of health care and calls for fundamental reform to ensure the service survives.

The new Health Secretary, much like previous SNP health Ministers, promises reform. But this report lays bare the SNP government’s catastrophic failure to re-mobilise our NHS following the pandemic and to recover. The waiting lists, the overcrowded emergency wards and the exhausted staff show how patients are paying the price for this incompetence.

Since 2013 there have been 20 different plans, strategies and reviews but no single national vision for the NHS. The report echoes what we have been demanding for years. It says there needs to be a national strategy for recovery that sets out the direction of travel in the next decade.

The need for leadership is clear, but it is absent. Without a proper plan to support primary and social care, the situation in our NHS will only deteriorate.

As our A&E departments overheat and almost one in six Scots languish on waiting lists, the cancellation of all infrastructure projects threatens to fan the flames of the NHS crisis.

The crisis is compounded by the financial mismanagement of the SNP which has left no money to build desperately needed healthcare facilities across Scotland.

Through delay and cancellation the Scottish government has simply abandoned rural and urban communities, ripping away plans for health facilities and simply leaving these places to their fate and monumental travel times to treatment.

The fact is that the very existence of our NHS is at risk under the SNP. Over the last 17 years they have failed Scotland’s health service. We need a strategy to develop the NHS, and to keep to Labour’s founding principles that treatment continues to be free at the point of use.

To do this we need a government that thinks bigger and is willing to focus its time on solutions, to address the causes of ill-health and to find ways of reducing demand on the service in the first place.

Before that we need to get the NHS back on its feet. Only Scottish Labour has a plan to slash waiting lists by delivering 160,000 more appointments every year, funded by closing the non-dom tax loophole, empower clinicians, and put modern technology at the heart of our NHS. That’s the change Scotland needs.