Scanlon: Patient Rights Bill should be a Patients Charter

The Scottish Parliament's Health & Sport Committee has published its Stage 1 report into the Patient Rights (Scotland) Bill.

Mary Scanlon MSP, Scottish Conservative Health spokesperson and a member of the committee, said:

"Scottish Conservatives are committed to promote the rights of patients and to foster a patient centred health service. After all, it was the Conservatives who published the first Patients' Rights Charter for Scotland in 1990.

"However, there are problems with this Bill. The Treatment Time Guarantee set out in the Scottish Government's Patient Rights Bill is not legally enforceable and a breach of the TTG will only result in an explanation, treatment at the next opportunity along with advice and support on how to complain - all of which exist at the present time. Thousands of patients with mental health problems will lose out as mental health is not included in this guarantee.

"The Bill also sets in legislation that ‘Health Care be patient focused and that anything done in relation to the patient must take into account the patient's needs, and there should be ‘regard to the important of providing the optimum benefit to the patient's health and wellbeing'.

"Since the inception of the NHS that is precisely what staff have been doing and patients have expected them to do - we don't need that in writing."

"For all these reasons and more, Scottish Conservatives will constructively support the revising and strengthening the current Patients Charter which was last revised in 2000."

Scottish Conservatives support the development of a more open and accessible system of patient feedback which does not exist at present. Often patients want to give constructive feedback following their health care experience but are generally told to make their comments in the form of a complaint, which many do not wish to do.

The Scottish Public Sector Ombudsman in evidence to the Committee stated that the Bill ‘confirms and makes explicit rights and expectations that already exist' and that ‘The notion of enshrining rights and principles in primary legislation carries the risk of an unwelcome increase in legalism and litigation in disputes between members of the public and the NHS'.

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