Bid to ban private GP surgeries

There will be tightened restrictions on vending machines, where youngsters can buy cigarettes without the need to prove their age, and on point of sale displays, widely viewed as an attempt to get around the tobacco advertising ban and which also tend to attract younger people.

In an exclusive interview with The Herald, Ms Sturgeon revealed that the bill includes legislation effectively making it impossible for commercial companies to be involved in operating family doctor's practices in Scotland. Instead, health boards will only be able to enter into contracts with individual GPs, or with partnerships of health professionals including at least one doctor. There will also be minimum limits on how long each professional must work, to eradicate the risk of so-called "sleeping partners".

The bill is the latest action by the SNP administration setting Scotland's health service apart from the model in England.

Meanwhile, despite the SNP's focus on protecting patient choice and access to services, the Scottish Health Secretary looked unlikely to intervene to prevent the controversial downgrading of the Vale of Leven Hospital in Dunbartonshire.

Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS Board yesterday voted to remove emergency services such as 24-hour anaesthetics, which will result in the transfer of thousands more patients to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley. Campaigners said the move would put lives at risk.

But Ms Sturgeon said yesterday's proposals, which also include expansion of other services at the hospital, were a vast improvement on the earlier plans that prompted her to order the review which led to yesterday's revised version.

While she appeared positive about the changes, she stressed she would not make a decision on whether to grant approval to the new plans until she had given them "due" consideration.

Explaining the purpose of the new legislation, which won near "unanimous" support from Scottish doctors during a recent consultation, Ms Sturgeon told The Herald: "We have decided to go ahead and legislate to effectively remove the possibility of commercial companies running GP practices.

"We want people providing GP services to be committed to the NHS and not to see it as a way of making a profit. I would hope that we would get considerable support for the bill from opposition MSPs."

The legislation, which ministers also expect to garner cross-party support, was sparked by concerns over a legal loophole which could allow into Scotland the kind of "creeping" privatisation of the NHS which is supported by the UK Government south of the border.

There, there are at least eight companies running NHS practices and more are expected to become corporate enterprises.

Most GP practices also operate as small businesses, but they are generally owned and run by doctors, nurses and other health professionals.

At the moment boards in Scotland can contract with a commercial company which would then employ doctors, but that goes against the SNP's commitment to keeping the NHS "true" to its public sector roots.

While no outside firms had ever succeeded in obtaining contracts to run GP surgeries in Scotland, several had tried, including global services firm Serco, which put in a bid to run a surgery in Harthill, Lanarkshire, in 2006, after the partnership there dissolved.

Patients and staff protested against the offer and it was eventually rejected by NHS Lanarkshire.

The British Medical Association has welcomed the ban on private enterprise, which Dr Dean Marshall, chairman of the BMA's Scottish general practitioners committee, has said showed that the Health Secretary recognised the importance of general practice as the "cornerstone" of the NHS.

However, the Confederation of British Industry Scotland has criticised the plans. It said that with many GPs already privately contracting to the NHS, it was discriminatory to deny others in the private sector the same right because of their "ownership model".

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