NHS treatment centres that may never be built the latest sign of SNP incompetence
Headless chickens might actually do a better job at fixing the NHS than the SNP
The idea of creating ‘national treatment centres’ was at the heart of the SNP’s strategy to put the NHS back on its feet. Collectively, they were supposed to deliver at least 40,000 extra elective surgeries, diagnoses and other procedures every year from 2026.
That year has now arrived and, to the surprise of no one familiar with the SNP’s track record, five of those centres have not yet been built. Now we learn they may not be. [See editor’s note below]
‘Making sense of that’
Asked if she could guarantee that the delayed centres would go ahead, Finance Secretary Shona Robison refused to do so. “That work is the work that... is going on about what should be delivered where, because it's making sense of that,” she explained, unhelpfully.
Robison added that the planned centres had been requested by health boards, but that Health Secretary Neil Gray was now “taking a national look at what is going to be provided where, to make sense of it, so that what is provided is not just what a board happened to come forward with, but where they're actually needed”.
This different approach would not “necessarily mean new buildings” but was “about delivering services in a different way” with potentially some "re-purposing” of existing facilities “in order to do things more quickly".
£36 million down the drain
Scottish Labour health spokesperson Jackie Baillie was able to lay out the situation with considerably greater clarity.
"After years of dither and delay, it is deeply regrettable that SNP ministers now appear to have completely ditched plans to build the NTCs that remain outstanding,” she said, adding that more than £36 million had been spent on the five unbuilt centres and that this “now looks like even more money down the drain”.
Saving the NHS from further decline requires politicians capable of identifying a workable, affordable plan and then seeing it through. This abrupt change of direction suggests headless chickens might actually do a better job.
Editor’s note: This article previously stated that a national treatment centre ward at Forth Valley Royal Hospital had not treated any patients nearly three-and-a-half years after work began. While there remain “outstanding issues linked to the construction of the new NTC inpatient ward”, an interim ward has been created and two additional operating theatres and a new MRI scanner are in operation.
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