Fraser: Protecting and improving our NHS

Speaking in this morning's health debate at Scottish Conservative Conference in Perth, Murdo Fraser MSP, Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Health & Wellbeing, said (check against delivery):

Can I start by thanking all the speakers who have contributed to the debate.

Thank my health team, Dr Nanette Milne MSP, Mary Scanlon MSP, Alex Johnstone MSP who deals with housing and communities, ably supported by our excellent researcher Lindsay Paterson.

Let me make one thing quite clear from the outset, the Scottish Conservatives support the NHS. It is a great public service, that all of us rely on.

The NHS does get some knocks from time to time, but people's individual experience of the service provided is usually that it is excellent. We have some superb and caring staff within the NHS who probably don't get enough recognition. So on behalf of our party can I say to all the staff in the NHS thank you for what you do.

Here in Perth we have an excellent local hospital in Perth Royal Infirmary. I have always had excellent service when I have visited. We want to see local hospitals like PRI continue and be supported. That is why we have taken the difficult decision that we are going to protect NHS spending. There will require to be cuts as we well know across the public services to deal with Labour's horrendous debt legacy, but we will not allow these cuts to touch the NHS.

And we have to be careful about what money we take out of the Health Budget. As from next month, the SNP Government in Scotland are giving everyone free prescriptions. That means people who are millionaires, Members of Parliament, and many others who can well afford to pay a small contribution towards the costs of their medicines will in future get them for free. We don't think that that is a good use of precious resources. The £40m being taken out of the Health Budget to give free prescriptions to people like Alex Salmond could be much better spent elsewhere maintaining and enhancing frontline services.

Even by protecting the budget, we know there are still cost pressures on the NHS and we know that with an ageing population, and ever increasing costs for drugs and treatments, money is always going to be tight.

The NHS is an excellent service but it is not perfect. There is a need for change in some areas. For a start, we should be cutting management costs. There is too much top tier management in Health Service, and too much interference with decisions taken by clinical staff in the front line of patient care. So our pledge today is that we will cut top management costs in the NHS by 30% over the next four years, and we will reinvest every penny of that money in enhancing frontline services.

We also need to look at the organisation of services within the public sector. At the moment social care is provided by local authorities, not the NHS. This leads to the horrible problem of delayed discharge, what we used to call bed blocking, where older and vulnerable people are left in a hospital bed when they should be transferred either to a care home, or back to their own homes with support for a care package. Delayed discharge causes human misery, and what is more it costs the NHS millions every year in unnecessary hospital stays. It is time this ended. That is why we will transfer social care out of local authorities into the NHS providing a joined up service and better value for money.

And, in some areas, our NHS in Scotland is lagging behind what is available south of the border. My constituent, Malcolm Bauld in Dunblane recently contacted me to raise concerns about his wife Gillian who suffers from breast cancer. Were she in England, she would have access to two specialist cancer drugs, but because she lives in Scotland they are only open to her if she self funds them, at a cost of more than £10k for a twelve week course of treatment. This cannot be right. Cancer patients in Scotland should not be left behind their counterparts in England. This is why we will introduce a £10m cancer drugs fund for Scotland so the 20 cancer drugs currently unavailable in Scotland can in future be funded.

Good health is not just about having a well funded localised health service. It is also about encouraging people to take greater responsibility for their own well being. And it is about identifying at the earliest possible age those who require additional support.

There is a great deal of international evidence which shows that early intervention, in the first three years of life, has hugely beneficial outcomes in terms of children's later life chances. That is why the Scottish Conservatives have pledged to invest an extra £20m in providing a truly universal Health Visitor Service providing support in the home for parents of young children, identifying at an early age those most in need.

Adults too, need to take an interest in their own health care and make appropriate lifestyle choices for their own wellbeing. The sad fact is that we in Scotland are all eating too much, drinking too much and not taking enough exercise, and that is not just Alex Salmond or other Members of Parliament that applies to all of us. Many of us would want better advice on healthy living but don't necessarily want to make a visit to a GP to do so.

That is why the Scottish Conservatives are today proposing free universal health checks for men and women aged between 40 and 74. Working with Community Pharmacy, we will deliver a range of drop-in services whereby simple checks can be carried out to identify high blood pressure, cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels and weight problems, catching the early signs of potential problems, helping people make healthier choices, and saving the Health Service a fortune in the long run.

And we need to have easier access to GPs, which is why we will pilot walk in centres to open up access to primary healthcare in our cities. It is been trialled successfully in England so why can't we do it here?

We have spend the NHS budget wisely, moving the balance of care from being reactive, simply responding to problems, to being more focused on preventative spending. Tackling problems early on, whether in adults or in children, will not just deliver better health outcomes for individuals, it will save the NHS money in the long run. It's the right thing to do.

I said earlier that the NHS in Scotland is an excellent service upon which all of us here rely. It could, however, be better. Our package of proposals will safeguard local services, retain funding on the frontline, reduce management costs and invest for the future. With your help we will make Scotland a healthier nation, and we will have a Health Service which is the envy of the world.

We will deliver on health just as we have been delivering in so many policy areas. Over the past four years the Scottish Conservatives have delivered a whole range of benefits for people across Scotland – more police on our streets, a Council Tax freeze, cuts in business rates, a £60 million Town Centre Regeneration Scheme, more investment in housing and help for small businesses, and much more. Our ambition, over the next four years, is to do even more. We achieved all this with 16 MSPs, with your help we can elect more and deliver more Conservative policies.

Some people would have you think this election is just about Labour versus the SNP, Gray verses Salmond, Tweedledum versus Tweedledee. Fortunately there is another option. For many people in Scotland, some of whom voted SNP for the first time in 2007, feel badly let down by all the broken promises, - on class sizes, on student debt, on local income tax, on support for homebuyers, and so the list goes on. But they don't trust Labour. They don't want a Labour party responsible for the ruination of the country's finances back in charge, and find the prospect of Iain Gray as First Minister a truly dismal one. People want an alternative to Gray and Salmond, and in Annabel Goldie we have the perfect answer – the only leader talking common sense in this Election.

So in the few weeks left between now and May 5th, get out there with our message, tell people about our record of delivery, tell them about our ambitious policies on health and in every other area, and tell them about our greatest asset, our leader Annabel Goldie. She's more than a match for Tweedledum and Tweedledee, let's do her proud in this campaign

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