By Professor John Robertson OBA

The above front page would be hard to dive below.

There are only 12 beds in two facilities in the UK which can carry out this specialist procedure. A child living in Morocco cannot be helped quickly enough and NHS Scotland, one tenth the size of NHS England, is somehow blamed for a lack of capacity UK-wide.

While the Sunday Mail may love to offer this kind of sickly tale, we never hear these stories:

First, in the Guardian 12 September 2023 , but getting no coverage at all across the BBC or ITV or the press:

Vulnerable eating disorder patients from England are being sent hundreds of miles from their homes to Scotland for treatment, as the number of available beds south of the border has dropped in two years.

Data from NHS England, which included the financial years 2020-2021, 2021-22 and 2022-23 and up to the end of May 2023, shows that 84 patients were sent from England to Scotland. The total cost of this was almost £9m. In the financial year 2022-23, 29 patients made this trip, costing more than £3.4m. The Guardian spoke to a young woman who had been sent more than 400 miles from Sussex to Glasgow, an eight-hour drive.

“There were five other patients who were from Sussex, and the majority of patients were English, a few were from Northern Ireland and Wales.”https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/12/england-patients-with-eating-disorders-sent-hundreds-of-miles-for-treatment

Second, in the previous year:

A shortage of beds for severely unwell eating-disorder patients has forced the NHS to send more than 100 women from England to hospitals in Scotland for treatment since 2017.

The cost of relocating patients, which included under-18s, was more than £10m, with one patient staying more than a year in hospital, costing close to £250,000.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jun/03/patients-with-eating-disorders-sent-from-england-to-scotland-due-to-lack-of-beds?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other&s=09

Third, from the British Journal of Anaesthesia in2016

England and Wales currently have fewer pain doctors than Scotland and Northern Ireland and that there are wide regional variations in the number of doctors specializing in pain medicine across England.

Fourth, during the pandemic in 2021:

English families are being asked to travel to Scotland to get a PCR test as shortages continue to hit the country amid a spike in coronavirus cases.

One woman from Kirklees in West Yorkshire, who asked not to be named, told Yorkshire Live about her own fears and said:

“My family are currently trying to get PCR tests as (we) have covid symptoms and the nearest place to get a PCR test is in Scotland.

Yorkshire Live also tried to access a PCR test and were also told Scotland was the nearest place to get them.https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/people-being-forced-travel-scotland-25814964

BBC Scotland is not covering this story.

In January 2021, they missed this too:

Coronavirus patients needing urgent medical treatment in northern England are being sent to Scotland as an increasing number of hospitals now face being overwhelmed. Patients in Cumbria who would normally be taken to the Cumberland Infirmary in Carlisle have instead been dispatched across the border to Dumfries, The Independent has learnt. The move came after the hospital triggered the highest Opel (operational pressures escalation level) alert, essentially an admission of being “unable to deliver comprehensive care”. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/covid-hospitals-overwhelmed-england-scotland-cumerland-dumfries-b1783111.html