I SUPPOSE one can only welcome the latest £600 million injection of cash into the Scottish health service which will apparently be used to shore up the service over the winter months. However, these regular headline-grabbing announcements seem to bear little relationship to, for example, reduced waiting times. 

Health Secretary Humza Yousaf said the Scottish Government would recruit 1000 new staff, including 750 nurses, midwives and allied health professionals from overseas, but hinted that it will not “mitigate every single challenge”.

I confess, I do feel just a bit uncomfortable in tempting staff from overseas where their skills are sometimes in shorter supply than here in Scotland. Perhaps a bit more effort and finance need to find their way towards our junior doctors, as we now apparently have as many as 50% of them thinking about leaving their posts, rather than robbing parts of the developing world of their already scarce medical resources.

Mr Yousaf’s statement came as recent figures showed August had the worst A&E waiting times on record, with almost 5000 people across Scotland waiting longer than 12 hours to be discharged or admitted. Almost 900 operations were cancelled by hospitals in August and the number of people in hospital who were well enough to be discharged jumped by 20% compared with last year – when we were still in the Covid crisis. Some will point to the English and Welsh NHS and say Scotland is generally doing a wee bit better than them. A wee bit better is not good enough if we are to persuade many more folk that an independent Scottish NHS (SNHS) will be a whole lot better than the current situation.

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I suppose everyone will have their own experience of the SNHS in the past year or so. Most will have a good tale to tell of caring staff and successful treatments. I do wonder how much of this large sum of extra cash will find to way to our GP practices. I recently called in at my own to make an appointment, something I have thankfully not done for some years. The earliest bookable appointment was two weeks away. It was suggested that I phone at 8am the following day in the hope that I could get an appointment for that day. I would be competing with many other patients in what would effectively be a telephone lottery with a GP appointment as a prize.

The following day, a text was sent from the practice to inform me, and presumably all its registered patients, that they “will be very short of GPs” in the following week, and I should consider visiting the practice website instead. I’m not sure how that will help me get a diagnosis of my sore leg.

You have to wonder if situations like this are adding to the number of patients who are simply heading to their nearest A&E department – and who can blame them. I fully understand that GPs are, in essence, private contractors but perhaps a serious look needs to be taken at the service level agreement and the financial arrangements that GP surgeries are working under.

How about it Mr Yousaf?

Brian Lawson

Paisley

I TAKE issue with the headline on Thursday’s letters page “There is no shortage of hard facts showing risks of gender self-ID”.

Your correspondent identifies 16 people who are currently being managed and cared for by the Scottish Prison Service. That is 16 people from a population of around five and a half million.

The writer adds another two examples of people who are in Ireland, then two more in England, so we are now looking at 20 cases from a population of around 26m. Dismissing the random example that is not identified but including the single case in Canada with its population of over 38.5m, we can see that the writer has presented 21 examples from a total population of 64.5 million.

In a progressive, independent Scotland we must find ways of engaging and supporting people who are different to us, including them in our society where ever possible. Should those differences give rise to concern, we must deal with our concerns with justice.

In the first instance, we must address the cause of concern whether it arises from how a person presents those differences or from prejudice and ignorance on the part of those who observe those differences.

I do not consider cases in a ratio of 21:64,500,000 as substantial evidence. This highly sensitive subject needs very careful consideration and reasoned discussion and debate, not the kind of scaremongering I have read in your letters page today.

Ni Holmes

St Andrews

“THE Markets are concerned”, “Markets are in crisis”, “Markets react negatively to mini-Budget”. I ask, who are these invisible “Markets”?

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It was my Kirkcaldy townie Adam Smith who coined the phrase “the invisible hand of the market”. Yesterday, we watched this invisible hand force the (now former) chancellor to hasten back to London with his plane being tracked on BBC News! An economic historian(PhD Cam), he has tried to manipulate/manage this hidden hand by turning the economic dial to the right. “They” don’t like it!

Gordon Brown (another Kirkcaldy historian/economistPhD Edn) tried to turn the dial of the economy mildly left and we had the crisis of 2008. The hidden hand doesn’t like being interfered with by ambitious brains.

The IMF (the trade union of capitalism) seeks to protect this hidden hand by covering it with a kind of capitalist integument, a protective skin of global policy directives. But in all of this, market forces remain invisible, ghost-like pulling economic strings and frightening governments.

Scotland seeking a national currency post-independence will as a priority seek to talk to this invisible hand and ask its permission!

Thom Cross

Carluke