By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 21 October 2011
The UK coalition’s health reforms are tantamount to privatisation and will not be followed in Scotland, Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon told delegates at the Scottish National Party conference in Inverness today.
Sturgeon, the SNP deputy leader, also predicted that the Scottish health service will outperform England’s, even without the increased competition and devolved budgeting to be introduced south of the border in the Health & Social Care Bill.
‘It is well known that we already have waiting times lower than at any time in the history of the NHS in Scotland. What is less well known is that we are the only part of the UK where waiting times continue to fall,’ she said.
‘I have no doubt that our NHS can and will outperform the privatised experiment south of the border.’
Sturgeon also announced a reduction from six weeks to four in ‘bed blocking’, the maximum time that elderly patients can be kept in hospital beyond clinical need, and to promise a further reduction to two weeks by 2015.
The SNP has put a pledge to protect frontline health spending at the centre of its programme for government, a commitment that the UK coalition argues can only be achieved by finding savings through NHS reforms.
But Sturgeon claimed that these reforms made the break-up of the NHS south of the border ‘inevitable’. She added: ‘The NHS in Scotland will remain a public service, paid for by the public and accountable to the public. There will be no privatisation of the NHS in Scotland.’
Earlier today, Infrastructure and Capital Investment Secretary Alex Neil announced a £1.5m boost for the Boiler Scrappage Scheme, a programme supporting householders to install more fuel-efficient boilers. The scheme has ended in England and Wales, but was renewed in Scotland.
Neil said that the 60% increase, which will extend the scheme to cover some 10,000 homes, formed part of a package of measures to alleviate fuel poverty. Spending on the package would increase by 35% by 2015, he said.
SNP leader Alex Salmond, in his opening speech to the conference yesterday, made a point of contrasting Scotland’s ‘unacceptable’ fuel poverty with the country’s rich reserves of oil, gas and renewable energy.
