21.10.11
Scotland will not follow England in ‘breaking up the NHS’
Scotland’s Health Secretary, Nicola Sturgeon, will accuse the UK government of trying to break up the NHS in her speech to the SNP conference in Inverness today, arguing that health service reforms in England are effectively an experiment in privatisation.
Sturgeon will say that the NHS in Scotland will not be privatised. She will say that she has “no doubt that our NHS can and will outperform the privatised experiment south of the border”.
She bases this on the fact that the NHS in Scotland has lower waiting times than ever before, and says it is the only part of the UK where waiting times continue to fall.
In an attempt to continue improving waiting times for patients, Sturgeon will also pledge to stop pensioners being “unnecessarily delayed” in hospital, aiming to reduce the target for them to stay in hospital from six weeks to four weeks initially, and then to two weeks by 2015.
Sturgeon will also argue that these targets will help to reduce the costs to the NHS from bed-blocking, which she believes currently amounts to more than 200,000 bed days each year, which means enough patients to fill a 600-bed hospital at a cost of up to £60m a year.
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