ALEX Salmond is ill-advised in concentrating his pro-independence arguments upon the NHS.
The Scottish Government already has full powers to spend its budget as it pleases. Despite this, as Colette Douglas Home shows ("Salmond's pledge is not enough to make me vote Yes", The Herald, August 19), cancer survival rates lag behind those of England and other parts of Europe. There are two further examples of how NHS Scotland is failing to deliver when compared with its much-maligned southern equivalent.
The treatment of first choice worldwide for localised prostate cancer is robotic laporoscopic surgery, using the Da Vinci system. These robotic machines are expensive, but cost-effective, and are recommended in England by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice).
The English NHS has 30 of them in use; it will be early next year before the first patients are expected to benefit from the system in Scotland, at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. Preventative medicine is now recognised as a cost-effective adjunct to the treatment of illness. To this end, the English NHS offers a Live Well health check, or "mid-life MOT", to everyone between the ages of 40 and 74. In Scotland, the equivalent is branded Keep Well, but is only offered to those aged between the ages of 40 and 64, and then only to those living in designated deprived areas. To my mind, in terms of the NHS, the Scottish Government is creating the inequality that it so much derides by not offering health screening to those in the 65 to 74 age bracket and to those not living in the target areas.
It is clear that on several fronts the people of Scotland are already getting a raw deal in comparison with those living to the south of the Border, and this cannot be blamed on Westminster. Whilst I cannot disagree with Mr Salmond's desire to create a fairer and more equal Scotland, his administration of the NHS clearly shows that he cannot be trusted to deliver on his political rhetoric.
Peter Spencer Davies,
15 Lochend Road, Bearsden.
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