Anas Sarwar: Today’s report lays bare how the SNP has failed our NHS

Of all the things Labour can be proud of achieving in government, the one that towers above the rest is our National Health Service.

Nearly 70 years ago, a Labour government set up the NHS based on patient need, not the ability the pay.

We will fight every day to protect our NHS: it is in our DNA.

But after a decade of SNP mismanagement our health service is in distress. Today’s expert report from Audit Scotland underlines a staggering levels of problems in our NHS under SNP control

The NHS in Scotland 2016 report reveals:

• Funding is not keeping pace with increasing demand and patient need
• Only one of the eight key performance targets for the NHS was met in the last year
• A workforce crisis resulting in a huge increase in agency spend – £175m spent in the last year alone
• A number of consultants making the equivalent of £400,000 per annum
• Health boards facing hundreds of millions of pounds of cuts especially in acute services
• Some health boards underfunded through the SNP Government’s own formula to the tune of tens of millions of pounds

This report reveals that under the SNP the workforce crisis in our NHS is so bad that private consultants can make the equivalent of £400,000 a year in our health service.

Last year our NHS was forced to spend £175m on agency staff making sky high rates.

This workforce crisis is a result of SNP mismanagement and botched workforce planning. You’ll never guess who the Health Secretary who cut nursing places was – ok, it was Nicola Sturgeon.

Our NHS staff are the foundations that our most valued public service is built on and they have been speaking out for months. Nine out of ten nurses tell us their workload is getting worse. One out of four GP surgeries saying they are understaffed and only a third of NHS staff believing there are enough of them to do their jobs properly.

If the doctors and nurses are telling us they are not getting the support and the SNP are still in denial then what chance do our patients have?

One ongoing source of pressure is from delayed discharge – patients who are clinically fit to be discharged from hospital but aren’t, often because there isn’t a social care package in place for them.

In February last year the SNP promised to eradicate delayed discharge from our NHS. Instead, they slashed hundreds of millions of pounds from the budgets of councils who provide social care – the very service needed to help people out of hospital.

The result has been hundreds of thousands of days spent in hospital by patients who didn’t need to be there.

You can read Scottish Labour’s full briefing on this from the summer here.

Labour would do things differently. We would end the sticking plaster solutions of the SNP and use the new powers of the Scottish Parliament to invest in social care to take the pressure off our hospitals and NHS staff.

That’s why Labour will introduce amendments to the Scottish budget to include a penny for public services on income tax so we can stop the cuts and invest instead.

It was Labour that introduced the NHS, and it is Labour that is putting forward the solutions to protect it. The SNP seem to be in complete denial about their total mismanagement of the NHS in Scotland.

Anas Sarwar is the Scottish Labour health spokesman.