Fund and protect our NHS
The Scottish Greens believe in a health service that is free at the point of need and funded by progressive taxation.
We will protect our NHS from private interests.
The Scottish Greens want to tackle Scotland’s poor public health by investing in prevention and early intervention. And we want to support people to live well. However, we also recognise the importance of protecting funding to secondary and acute care so that when people do become ill, the NHS is there for them.
We will ensure our NHS remains financially sustainable for generations to come by fundamentally reforming how it works. Our vision is for a health system where the focus is on prevention, community services and reducing health inequalities.
The backlog of care which built up during the pandemic, alongside historic understaffing of services, has meant that healthcare staff are under more pressure than ever. We want to grow the workforce by making it as attractive and easy as possible for people to join the NHS. We will ensure services have sufficient staff so we can cut waiting lists and people can get appointments when they need them.
It is vital that we also support people to die well and we need to have honest conversations about what a good death looks like. Palliative care has been neglected for too long and we will invest in services so that people can access help and support in their community, 24/7.
Primary and Community Care
- Increase investment to general practice to reflect the fact that GPs deliver over 90% of patient contact within the NHS.
- Invest in the recruitment of GPs with the aim that there will be one GP for every 1,000 patients and, once those GPs are in place, offer 15 minute appointments.
- Expand the multidisciplinary team in GP practices to include, for example, mental health practitioners and welfare rights officers.
- Embed community links workers who can help patients with issues such as poverty, housing and isolation by, for example, referring to support in their community, in every GP practice across Scotland, starting rollout in practices in deprived areas.
- Ensure GPs have protected learning time so they can keep up to date on recent medical developments and continue to provide excellent care.
- Improve digital and IT systems and introduce a single electronic patient record between primary care, hospital and social care teams.
- Reform funding and structure of Integration Joint Boards, to allow local health boards to invest better in preventative and community healthcare.
- End all charges for dental treatment and gradually bring dental practices fully into NHS ownership by supporting health boards to expand the Public Dental Service in areas of highest need.
- Expand the role of Dental Therapists to allow direct access and treatment, ensuring more people can receive dental treatment with shorter waiting times, and be referred to a dentist when required.
Staffing
- Introduce nurse-to-patient ratios for all health and care settings so that no nurse will have a caseload over a pre-defined number of patients.
- Act to attract more people into the nursing profession, including a nationwide recruitment campaign and an expansion of the routes into nursing. In addition, introduce a cost-of-living increase to the student nurse bursary and extend the bursary to all student allied health professionals.
- Increase specialty training places and implement pay restoration for resident doctors, and publish a rolling workforce plan.
- Push the UK Government to provide Automatic Leave to Remain for all medical students studying in Scottish universities.
Palliative care
- Deliver a long-term, sustainable funding model for hospice care, including fully implementing pay parity between NHS and hospice care staff.
- Establish an independent review of palliative care to drive urgent system reform and identify investment needed to meet rising population needs, expand community-based care and reduce avoidable hospital use for those as the end of life.
- Ensure all patients, carers and health and care staff have access to a 24/7 palliative care helpline to get support and specialist advice.
- Make training in palliative care a mandatory requirement for all workforces supporting a terminally ill person, including care home staff and social care staff, with provision for unpaid carers.
Public health
- Restrict the advertising of food and drink high in fat, sugar and/or salt in Scotland, including outdoor advertising such as billboards, public transport and sponsorship of professional sports and events and ban energy drinks for under-16s.
- Roll out emergency department opt-out HIV and blood-borne virus testing programmes in areas with a high HIV prevalence and to other health settings.
- Deliver a national Online HIV Prevention Service that’s a one-stop-shop for at-home HIV testing and online PrEP access.
- Increase funding and staffing to improve access for all, particularly in rural and remote communities and launch a multilingual, accessible public health campaign to build vaccine confidence.
Cancer
- Provide funding to address workforce shortfalls and geographic inequalities in Scotland.
- Invest in rolling out new tests to detect less survivable cancers earlier, such as the breath test for pancreatic cancer.
- Increase institutional research and innovation funding to support cancer research to identify new treatments.
- Increase the promotion of and access to screening programmes.
- Reduce socio-economic and geographical disparities in care and ensure all patients, regardless of location, have access to high quality diagnostics and treatments.
Specialist services
- Introduce a “Right to Rehabilitation” whereby everyone is assessed for rehabilitation needs on diagnosis or discharge from hospital.
- Create and implement a national multi-disciplinary long covid pathway.
- Reduce inequalities through targeted condition-specific support for deprived and high-risk communities.
- Invest in scaling up the detection and management of risk factors for heart attack and stroke.
- Support the development and piloting of a cardiology community service to move closer to communities.
- Create a network of NHS, third sector and community services to detect cardiovascular risk factors.
- Deliver a 24/7 thrombectomy service.
