“Lots of you think that ‘tampons on the NHS’ is the direction we’re going. I think it’s going to look more like ‘buy your own insulin’.”
NHS
The announcement of NHS Highland buying out HC-One’s Home Farm care home in Skye has taken away the focus in much of the media from the Care Inspectorate’s official inspection report at Home Farm from 18 May, which has only just been published by the care regulator now. You can access it here. It makes absolutely […]
The Home Farm buy-out leaves a sour taste
Health Secretary Jeane Freeman has announced she will not be seeking re-election next year. Freeman joins Mike Russell, Aileen Campbell and Roseanna Cunningham in being the latest Minister to announce that she will be stepping down. “While I have a great deal of energy left and more I want to do, I think it is […]
Jeane Freeman to step down at Holyrood elections
NHS workers across the country have been out protesting their exclusion from a recently announced pay rise for public sector workers.
NHS Workers Protest for Equal Pay Rise
While the media’s attention was focused on the answers of Permanent Secretary Leslie Evans in the first day of the Holyrood-Salmond inquiry yesterday, Health Secretary Jeanne Freeman came up with some pretty curious answers of her own in response to questioning about the care homes crisis in parliament on Tuesday. Asked about the Sunday Post’s […]
The Scottish Govt can’t wash its hands of hospital discharge to care homes
“The advantages of one National Care Service aligned with the NHS would be considerable… Instead of providers competing with the NHS for scarce staff, resources could be planned and deployed where most needed.”
Nick Kempe: It’s time for debate on a National Care Service for Scotland
Health Secretary Jeane Freeman is set to take questions today from MSPs on the care homes crisis, the eye of the Covid-19 storm in Scotland. Yesterday’s weekly National Records of Scotland statistics revealed that there are now more deaths in care homes than the rest of Scotland combined, a tragic outcome three months into a […]
Care Homes crisis: 4 questions for the Health Secretary
A panic about contact tracing in Minnesota, United States, spread after Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said that they were “contact tracing” protestors there. “As we’ve begun making arrests, we have begun analysing the data of who we have arrested and begun actually doing what we think is almost pretty similar to our Covid [strategy]. […]
Why outsourcing and secrecy is the route to contact tracing and testing failure
The UK is going Korean. Having led with a herd immunity approach to this crisis, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is now said to be convinced that South Korea’s “test, trace, isolate” is the model for Britain. That means forcing the rate of transmission down low through the lockdown, and at the same time building a […]
Putting the genie back in the bottle
“This is a health crisis. This is an economic crisis. But in Scotland, this is a full-scale national political crisis too.”