Health / Proposal to merge NHS boards to achieve very little, according to local health board chair
Lib Dems and SNP also voice opposition to Labour idea
THE CHAIR of NHS Shetland has poured cold water on proposals by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar to merge Orkney, Shetland, Highland, Western Isles and Grampian health boards into one.
Gary Robinson said this sort of idea appeared to be like busses; “you wait long enough and another suggestion to merge health board comes round again”.
He said the proposal put forward at the Labour conference in Glasgow this week would deflect from the real issues of service delivery and cutting waiting times.
He however welcomed that the debate of public sector reform was again making headlines.
Sarwar had suggested that Scotland would be better served by just three large health boards rather than the 14 regional boards currently responsible for delivering health services.
The Scottish Labour leader said his proposals would take on “top-heavy management”, cut waste in the health service, and would be implemented if he was to lead the next Scottish Government.
However, an opinion poll last week found Scottish Labour at just 18 per cent, potentially the worst result for the party since devolution. The next Holyrood elections are in May next year.
Robinson, who is also the deputy leader of Shetland Islands Council, said large scale structural change was likely to “distract from the work that is immediately in front of us and needs to get done”.
Speaking from the Labour conference where he and council leader Emma Macdonald were manning an SIC stand, Robinson said: “I am not convinced that the evidence supports that mergers will improve anything.
“In in the short term we really need to be focussed on delivering the level of treatments and getting treatment time down.
“We are seeing the opposite ends of the debate coming out here,” he added.
“You’ve got Labour on the one hand who are saying that big health boards are the answer, and on the other end of that scale, the Scottish Government are saying we need more collaboration.
“In Shetland, we are trying to make the integration joint board [where the health service and council-run social care co-operate], and the community planning partnership work, and I think we are in a better place in Shetland than many other places, because we work across all the different agencies quite well.”
He continued saying that too much bureaucracy was an assumption that was not reflected in reality, at least not locally.
“I would invite anybody to come NHS Shetland and look at the structure that we’ve got. [For example], we have a medical director who is a practicing GP; we have not got that huge a bureaucracy.
“The combined cost of having a board is probably less than a single consultant.
“There might be bureaucracy in some areas of the health sector, but certainly not in Shetland. Even if they merge boards, you still have to have people in Shetland performing functions like managing staff.”
His views were echoed by Shetland Liberal Democrat MSP Beatrice Wishart, whose party has been opposed to moves of centralising any kind of public service in the past.
“Scottish Labour fundamentally misunderstands island and rural communities if they think that our needs are best served by a health board that could be based as far away as Dundee.
“Regardless of which party proposes centralising health services, I cannot see how islanders’ needs and the services to deliver them, are best met by a mainland superboard,” she said.
“NHS Shetland already works well in partnership with NHS Grampian and other boards for health treatments that are not available in the isles.”
Meanwhile, the governing SNP have been challenging Labour to “come clean” and say, “which valuable and dedicated NHS staff they intend to sack”.
The convenor of the parliament’s health, social care and sport committee, the SNP’s Clare Haughey said: “Our hard-working staff in NHS Scotland go above and beyond to support patients – and that is exactly why under the SNP nurses in Scotland are the highest paid in the UK.
“Figures this week revealed that thanks to increased investment from the SNP, waiting times across the NHS are falling – the SNP government has a plan and it is working.
“If Labour is serious about reducing waiting times and backing our NHS they will stop the shameful job cuts talk and instead back the Scottish budget this week, which will invest a further £200 million in clearing waiting lists.”
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