Thanks to Karen Irving for alerting me to this.
In Nova Scotia, a province of Canada, population 971 000, 15%, 148 000, have no doctor or nurse practitioner registration.
There are 5.8 million people registered with a GP in Scotland despite the population being only 5.4 million. Scotland’s media have no reports of unregistered people. https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/general-practice-demographics-data-visualisation/general-practice-demographics-data-visualisation-up-to-31-december-2022/
Canada has a GDP of $54 350 per head. Scotland has a GDP of $42 182.
So we have a far better ferry service and more GPs? Where will it end?
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
Nearly half a million people registered with a GP in Scotland that don’t actually live in Scotland , now let me guess where they do live ,oh yes across the border in England , getting their free prescriptions sent to chemist at their real address and not their relatives address or holiday let in Scotland .
Who are these people that run the online prescription ordering app called patient-services , anyway ?
Oh , cegedim healthcare solutions
Address Marathon Place, Cegedim, Moss Side Industrial Estate, Leyland PR26 7QN England , Cegedim a big company , Are there links to the Virgin Islands ? There’s a Cegedim house there according to companies house.
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“Nearly half a million people registered with a GP in Scotland that don’t actually live in Scotland”
My feeble attempts to Google that have failed – can you say where you find that stat?
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In this article , third para
“There are 5.8 million people registered with a GP in Scotland despite the population being only 5.4 million. Scotland’s media have no reports of unregistered people.”
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Thanks – I was hoping to find the info somewhere ‘more official’. So I persevered and found it tucked away towards the end of this:
Click to access 2022-12-13-gp_workforce_report.pdf
The difference between the country’s population and the Community Health Index population is explained as:
1. CHI will include people who have been given a CHI number but have since left the country to live for a period of time abroad.
2. CHI will include overseas visitors who registered with a GP in Scotland or received screening services at a point in time during their visit.
3. CHI will include students who have moved from Scotland during or after their studies but who have not registered elsewhere in the UK.
So you could well be right – many of them simply do live across the border and pop back here when they have medical needs.
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https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/general-practice-demographics-data-visualisation/general-practice-demographics-data-visualisation-up-to-31-december-2022/
I’m guessing many have moved registered with a new GP and not deregistered with the previous?
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I’m not sure that’s possible – I’ve only moved and changed my GP the once, and, from memory, the act of registering with the new one automatically deregistered me with the previous one.
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Vancouver homelessness video.
This is what happens when you allow everything to be privatised.
It’s the same in USA.
It’s what Westminster want for U.K.
Scotland will resist.
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Just wait ’til Gulhane and Baillie hear about this Nova Scotia GP crisis . They’ll be on BBCScorchedland complaining about this SNP failure in providing a proper Health Service for these New Scotland patients .
What do you mean , It’s not in Scotland ? Next you’ll be claiming Darlington is not Scottish either !
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Every country in the developed world is facing the same issue of an ageing population with complex medical needs.
One way to mitigate these issues is to try and take a holistic view with joined up health services backed by a culture of prevention being better than cure which often costs less.
At least,here in Scotland some attempts at this are being made but as usual being hindered through English Tory policies and legislation.
Drug policy being just one example.
On order to tackle these social issues the policy decision makers need access to the full range of powers of a normal country.
As far as I know,the Canadian provinces have more or less full autonomy from Ottawa so should be able to achieve the outcomes they desire.
If they were hog tied in the same way as Scotland,it would be less certain.
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O/T.
BBC 24 is running a story on NHS England cancelling cancer targets.
Alongside the report are pictures of Anas Sarwar.
Is the a by-election in Scotland?
BBC “neutrality” to the fore–as per usual.
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For anyone visiting this site who thinks Labour has the answers to the problems of the NHS in contrast to the SNP in government, this from the BBC News website’s Welsh section should provide a salutary lesson:
From 28 June 2023: ‘NHS in Wales and GPs face collapse, BMA union says’:
’GP services “will collapse in Wales and the NHS will follow” soon after unless urgent support is provided, the British Medical Association has warned. As patient levels rise, numbers of GP surgeries and doctors are falling amid inadequate resources and unsustainable workloads, BMA Cymru Wales has claimed. It has written to the Welsh government, urging more funding and staff help.’
‘Dr Gareth Oelmann, chair of the BMA’s general practitioners committee in Wales, said he would expect staff to hand back their contracts without resolving the issues GPs are facing.’
Interestingly, in the BBC Wales article there are no reactions to the BMA’s dire warnings from ANY opposition politician! (Given their constant negative refrain about NHS services here, presumably the Labour leadership in Scotland are too busy in their campaign of half truths and misrepresentation in Rutherglen to ‘realise’ what the BMA is saying about NHS Wales and its responsible government?)
To be more serious, there can be few people across the UK that would deny that the NHS model of health service provision is under very severe pressure.
Generally rising scale of demand due to an ageing population; a prolonged period of austerity instigated by Tory governments as a economic policy; difficulties in recruitment and retention of clinical and other staff due to unattractive rates of pay and other poor working conditions; insufficient investment in clinical education and training; underinvestment in the construction and maintenance of the NHS estate; underinvestment in medical technology; a tight labour market over recent years resulting from wider policy decisions made in Westminster; a UK health and related care services system exposed for its lack of resilience by the Covid pandemic – these factors and no doubt others have all contributed to where we are now.
In short, there is a long list of deep seated, present and historic negative factors impacting the delivery of health (and social care) across the whole of the UK.
The notion that devolved administrations in Belfast, Cardiff or Edinburgh have sufficient economic, fiscal and/or borrowing powers – either over the short or the longer term – to turn around these UK-wide factors and deliver a substantially better, sustainable and publicly funded health and social care service in NI, Wales and Scotland than that in England is ‘for the birds’!
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This from the Guardian today may be of interest.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/14/which-uk-nation-has-got-the-longest-nhs-waiting-list
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That’s a great link. Congratulations are due to the journalists Pamela Duncan, Michael Goodier and Anna Bawden of the Guardian for providing one of the most informative and balanced pieces of reporting on the NHS, its financing and its performance across the four nations of the UK I’ve seen in the mainstream news media for some time.
Worth a blog post to amplify the details?
It’s notable how poorly the NHS in Wales turns out despite it being run by the political party with all the answers (apparently) for NHS Scotland: refer to Dame Jackie MSP and her words of wisdom captured weekly by BBC Scotland for details. (I have no wish to criticise the Welsh government but do take issue with the hypocrisy of the Labour LEADERSHIP in Scotland.)
But to do serious politics, and as indicated in my earlier btl post – the notion that devolved administrations in Belfast, Cardiff or Edinburgh have sufficient economic, fiscal and/or borrowing powers – either over the short or the longer term – to counter UK-wide factors that have damaged the national health service and be able to deliver sustainable, publicly funded health and social care services that are substantially better than those in England is – under present constitutional arrangements – ‘for the birds’!
The solution for Scotland and its NHS is national self-determination, is agency, not the Labour Party!
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You have to assume there is an emement of health tourism from numerous English scamming our services. Fundamental dishonesty is their national trait after all.
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Interesting as comparison with Nova Scotia may be, the UK’s politically imposed austerity approach, particularly toward the NHS, makes for a uniquely different series of difficulties for the population which Canadians would not tolerate for a second.
– The dogma of a political party depressing peoples’ incomes to within a whisper of bankruptcy, medical professionals reduced to food-banks by dint of an “independent pay review body” which is anything but.
– Yet crucially, no matter which political party has come to power in the UK over the last 50 years, they all religiously held to the same brand of neo-liberal economics despite it having consistently failed to improve the lot of the populace.
Canadians are not daft enough to believe repeating the process will somehow produce a different result to previous failures, in the UK they do.
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Canada has more than a GP problem in Vancouver.
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