The National Health Service is the UK’s greatest post-war achievement and unites the country in our love for it.
Before its creation 75 years ago today children were dying from routine illnesses like chest infections because their parents could not afford to take them to the doctor. The free from point of need NHS changed all that and subsequent vaccination programmes meant killer diseases like smallpox are now confined to history.
Our children – and adults– continue to benefit from vaccinations, with measles, mumps, rubella and whooping cough on the wane and coronavirus now at a more manageable level. From the moment we are born to the hour of our death all our treatment is free.
And the dedication and compassion of our nurses, doctors and allied health workers is truly world class. But as it celebrates its 75th birthday, the future of our NHS is not assured.
At a UK level, we have a Tory party that can’t be trusted to support the NHS – despite its protestations to the contrary. The very idea of an NHS was opposed by the Tories who voted against the bill to create it on 21 occasions before Clement Atlee’s post-war Labour Government voted through the vision of its health secretary Nye Bevan.
But every time the Tories get into power they chip away at this great institution. The way the Tories have run the health service in England should send shivers up and down Scottish spines –and convince any waverers that they should never get their hands on power at Holyrood.
Under Tory PM David Cameron’s Health and Social Care Act of 2012 in England there has been intense pressure brought to bear on NHS trusts to outsource services the state provides to “for profit” providers.
One NHS hospital, Hinchingbrook in Cambridgeshire, was placed in the hands of a private provider that same year, although the contract was handed back in 2015 because the company could not keep up with demand.
Another private company was stripped of its contract after four days because there were so many complications after the eye surgeries they were providing at a hospital in Somerset. But make no mistake, that is a flavour of things to come if the Tories get their way north of the Border.
Between 2013 and 2020, £11.5billion was handed to private companies to provide NHS services by the UK Government – with a massive chunk going to line the pockets of fatcats from abroad whose interest in the health of the UK is purely financial.
If this Tory mob were ever to get a sniff of power at Holyrood, the slow march of NHS privatisation would begin here too. However, the current state of our devolved NHS in Scotland can only be partly blamed on decades of Tory austerity.
Successive SNP health secretaries have also failed to get a grip on the growing crisis in our hospitals. One in seven Scots are languishing on waiting lists, often in pain and without any notion of when their conditions will be treated.
Our sickest people are having to wait hours beyond what is safe at A&E with many stuck in the back of ambulances with no room for them in hospital. Delayed discharges are worsening, while the numbers having their operations cancelled has risen by almost a quarter in a single month.
Add to this the failures in cancer treatment waiting times – currently at their worst level since records began. Then the continued breach of treatment time guarantees, where every patient who is judged to need treatment will begin it within 12 weeks.
The chaos and failure within the NHS in Scotland predated the corona outbreak – and requires radical thinking to put it right. The Scottish Government has made much of the fact that the tax system in Scotland is more progressive than the rest of the UK – meaning those on middle and high incomes pay more.
The Daily Record supports a fairer tax system – but we have been dismayed at the millions wasted on the doomed bottle deposit scheme, the ferry scandal, the failed Rangers prosecution payouts and many more less headline grabbing examples of money down the drain.
If we want an NHS that is fit for another 75 years, let’s see all of that extra tax take going into our hospitals and frontline health services. Not to line the pockets of profiteers or health board bureaucrats but to make our health service the best in the world – a boast we often hear but that rings increasingly hollow.
Now it is time for progressive political leaders – whether that is Labour at Westminster or the SNP at Holyrood – to pull on their gloves, get in the ring and fight like fury for our NHS. Only then will our health service be assured of another 75 years saving lives and helping us all when we are at our most vulnerable.
Don't miss the latest news from around Scotland and beyond - sign up to our daily newsletter here.
