Local National Health Services

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 28 September 2016.

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Photo of Miles Briggs Miles Briggs Conservative

I am pleased to close today’s debate for the Scottish Conservatives. It has been useful in that it has allowed members from all sides of the chamber to voice constituents’ genuine concerns about service changes or downgrades in their areas.

I grew up in rural Perthshire. Any time that I or anyone in my family needed care, we could rely on the highly valued Perth royal infirmary. I am pleased to say that I did not need to call on its services very often when I was growing up, but the same cannot be said for my sister, who fared much worse, with broken arms and other fractures over the years—the life experience of growing up in the countryside.

When thinking about today’s debate, I considered just how valued Perth royal infirmary was to our family and how grateful the whole community across Perthshire and Kinross-shire has always been to NHS staff, the vast majority of whom live locally, for the services that they provide. I was therefore saddened to learn of how many of Perth royal infirmary’s key services have been lost to the local community in recent years. In fact, since the SNP Government came to power, Perth royal infirmary, which serves one of Scotland’s fastest-growing population areas, has seen the continuous removal of services such as the maternity ward, paediatrics, pathology, weekend surgery, emergency surgery, and, most recently, the GP out-of-hours service, which have all been centralised at Ninewells hospital in Dundee. SNP ministers and health board officials stated that each proposal did not constitute major changes to services. However, it is pretty clear to anyone looking at Perth royal infirmary that the staged removal and closure of services that has taken place over a number of years has ultimately led to the end of PRI as an acute district general hospital.

As it has with all the key hospital services that are mentioned in the Labour motion today, too often the Scottish Government has been satisfied to hide behind health boards’ decisions and to support the downgrading and closure of services. The unintended or perhaps intended consequence has been the highly centralised health service that we are seeing being developed in Scotland today.

On services that are currently under threat in Lothian, I welcome the positive case that Alex Cole-Hamilton and Ash Denham made for retaining the cleft palate surgery unit in Edinburgh. I am pleased that, on that issue, SNP members have started to speak out against the proposals. I again call on the Scottish Government not to approve the centralisation of the surgery unit, which we debated in my recent members’ business debate on the subject. I welcome the fact that the cabinet secretary has announced that she is due to visit the Edinburgh and Glasgow teams over the next few weeks and I hope that those visits will help to persuade her that the two-site model, which works well in Scotland and in many locations across the United Kingdom, is in the best interests of cleft patients across Scotland.