to see patients quickly.
In BBC 1’s 1pm report on ambulance waiting times the above important factor is mentioned.
Regular readers may remember reading here that Scotland has a hospital bed for every 265 people whereas England only has one for every 413 and Scotland has 50% more nurses per patient than NHS England. That must make a difference but not one to be reported by BBC Scotland.
Sources:
Talking-up Scotland 
BBC Radio 4 News at 6.00pm tonight was pretty scathing about the Ambulance and A&E services in England.
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Of course the SG has also put more money, £20 million, and more personnel into the Ambulance Service. This from Sept 2021
https://www.gov.scot/news/almost-300-extra-ambulance-staff-being-recruited/
This was in addition to an extra £11 million given to the Ambulance Service by the SG in 2020
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I buy every last word of this, but I wonder if rUK, or specifically England is the bar we should be using to judge where we are. It’s not that high a bar is it? It’s an unassailable point that we are funded as though we “are” England – ie our spending envelope is the one they set for us. All true.
However, were we to try to draw comparisons with other countries we might aspire to be like when we become independent. to show what might be achieved by independence – or whether on an international comparison we are already doing ok (despite Lisa Summers’ best attempts to make it appear otherwise). This wont always be easy – it’s not easy within the Uk. To take an example Denmark had 3.6 “physicians” for every 1000 popn in 2005, while the UK had only 2.4. However, it’s also known that the Danes have fewer GPs, putting more emphasis on hospital care. In turn then this would open up not just the debate about numbers but also about how health services can best be organized. For instance, as long as treatment is free at the point of use, would anyone consider the current organization to be set in stone? Or, with the freedom that independence gives us, is there another, better model that we might move to.
Comparison within the UK is fine for political points, but looking outwith the UK offers us more degrees of freedom and also to develop arguments based on what we might do with independence once it is achieved.
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This is a really good point. Maybe one which should be part of the independence narrative?
“Scotland does better than England when forced to play by their rules. Think how much better we could be if we made our own…”
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Prof,
You might want to squirrel this away for future references. An interesting thread
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