The SNP government has spent £685m on private healthcare to take pressure off the NHS in its first decade of power, despite vowing to cut back on its use.
The private healthcare bill for Scottish taxpayers hit £78.5m in 2015-16, new figures show. That compares with £61m when the nationalists came to power.
While the overall figure for spending on private healthcare in Scotland fell last year, four health boards (Grampian, Tayside, Western Isles and Lanarkshire) spent record levels.
“Despite the SNP government’s rhetoric on how it is opposed to using the private sector for NHS procedures, these figures show that it has been spending significantly more in the private sector in the past six years compared with when it was elected,” said Scottish Conservative public health spokesman Miles Briggs. “Indeed, since 2012-13 it has been spending about an extra £20m each year in the private sector compared with 2006-07. These figures are another indication of the state of the health service under SNP stewardship and its failure to support . . . adequate workforce planning across the country.”
Briggs said his party is not opposed to using the private sector to fill gaps in provision, but that the SNP should be honest about its need to rely on private hospitals to deliver routine operations to all who need them within waiting- time targets.
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Health secretary Shona Robison said: “Private sector spending fell last year and represented just 0.6% of the Scottish government’s total health budget in 2015-16.
“The NHS in England spent 7.6% of its budget on the independent sector last year.”
Attacks on health staff
Statistics revealing more than 60,000 attacks on NHS Scotland staff since 2012 have been described by the Liberal Democrats as “incredibly concerning”.
Party health spokesman Alex Cole-Hamilton has called on the government to do more to tackle the problem, after obtaining the data under freedom of information law.
Figures provided by regional health boards disclosed 61,360 attacks on health workers, but the actual total is likely to be higher as some boards did not submit any data for the current year. This includes Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS board, which has the highest level of incidents in each of the four years leading up to 2016-17, including 6,581 in 2014-15.