National Treatment Centre

The Scottish Government’s infrastructure delivery pipeline sets out the infrastructure projects and programmes that the Scottish Government will fund over the next four financial years. The Government is working with all health boards to develop a whole-system infrastructure plan to identify investment priorities across NHS Scotland. Projects that had begun the business case process but were then paused, such as the remaining national treatment centres, will be considered as part of that work.

I well understand why Mr Fraser is an advocate for national treatment centres. They work, they are very productive and they are effective at reducing waiting lists. I reassure him that the remaining national treatment centres will be considered as part of that whole-system infrastructure planning.

I remind Mr Fraser about the financial context in relation to the real-terms cuts to the block grant by the previous United Kingdom Government and the real-terms reduction in capital funding under the current UK Government.

I will write to Mr Fraser with full details on his point about emergency departments. It is an important issue, because any such move would be a significant service delivery change. National health service boards, through their functions and authorities, have to consider how best to facilitate the right care at the right time, but it is worth putting on the record that there needs to be much further engagement on and exploration of those matters.