Is the National Health Service Better or Worse?
As the politicians in the Scottish Parliament debated the state of the National Health Service, they traded “facts and figures” from the Information Statistics Division of NHS Scotland. Depending on the data selected, they appeared to contradict one another. Government ministers, who had undertaken to get waiting lists down, were confronted with the number of people awaiting inpatient and day case treatment had increased by 1,590 to 113,612 in the year to December 2004, its highest-ever level. The median waiting time for a hospital appointment had also gone up from 40 days to 43. So the Scottish Executive argued that median waiting times do not adequately reflect how quickly the NHS is seeing and treating patients. They pointed instead to a fall in the numbers waiting more than six months and argued that Scotland was leading the UK in the diagnosis and treatment of coronary heart disease. Spending by the government in Scotland has risen from 4.1 billion in 1995 to 8.3 billion this year
