Why SNP's NHS improvement plan inspires so little confidence from frontline staff

NHS waiting lists in Scotland are expected to increase to a million by the end of this year

In his 334-word foreword to the government’s NHS Scotland operational improvement plan, Health Secretary Neil Gray resorted to repeating himself.

In the first two paragraphs, he declared tautologically that, in order to renew the health service, “we must reduce the immediate pressures across the NHS” – among other things – and that “this will require a process of reform and renewal... that reduces immediate pressures across the NHS...”

Perhaps this was an attempt to emphasise his determination, but for critics it merely added to the sense of a government that has been presiding over the decline of the health service for years, with little to no idea about how to arrest it, let alone turn things around.

And of course, there was the near-obligatory, blame-shifting mention of “Westminster austerity” and the excuses for government failure that keep on giving: “the effects of the pandemic” and “rising costs due to inflation”. In other words, if this plan fails like all the others, it’s not our fault. Scottish Labour’s Jackie Baillie noted acerbically this was “the SNP government's fifth plan in four years, yet thousands of Scots are still queuing for A&E every week”.

The NHS crisis looks set to continue under the SNP (Picture: Christopher Furlong) | Getty Images

More staff needed

Colin Poolman, director of the Royal College of Nursing Scotland, was also unimpressed, saying the plan contained “little that is new”.

He added that nursing students were “concerned they will not get a job when they qualify later this year because health boards are cutting recruitment” at a time when more staff are needed.

Similarly, the British Medical Association Scotland called for more doctors to be trained in this country and for efforts to be made “to increase ethical recruitment of doctors from outside the UK”.

The people on the frontline know what needs to happen, and their pleas for reinforcements should be heeded, and acted upon.

The number of people on an NHS waiting list in Scotland is set to hit a million by the end of the year.

The pressure on this latest plan to at last deliver meaningful results could not be greater.