The NHS has been protecting people at the point of need since it was established in 1948 but the principles on which it was founded have been severely dented by a combination of poor staffing levels and coronavirus.
The NHS was born out of a long-held ideal that good healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth, and had three core drivers – that it met the needs of everyone, was free at the point of delivery and that it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay.
But elderly people such as Morven Cumming are not having their needs met.
Morven has had lumps on her breasts which she has been having checked regularly for more than 40 years and, while the cut-off age for routine breast screening is 70, she had always been able to self refer beyond this age.
But now Morven, and many women like her, have been refused breast screening – causing them increased anxiety at an already worrying time.
And there is no prospective date for the elderly to be able to resume testing once more because the NHS is so far behind with its routine testing.
That is simply not good enough.
Nurses and doctors don’t want to turn our elderly away but the Scottish Government’s Covid rules say they must.
There needs to be a clear plan and an injection of cash to get the NHS working again properly and to ensure our elderly citizens, who have paid into the NHS all their working lives, get treatment and reassurance when they most need it.
A rare political agreement
It is not often that Gordon Brown and Nicola Sturgeon find themselves in agreement. But the Labour and Nationalist giants are correct to describe the £20 a week cut in Universal Credit this week as immoral.
Taking food from the mouths of babes is literally what the Tory government is doing with this callous move.
Brown, when he was chancellor, found a way of introducing a tax credits system that transferred money directly to working people in need.
Sturgeon, with the Scottish child payment, also recognises direct support is the quickest and most effective way to lift people out of poverty.
These measures require funds and that means tax. But from his own mouth the Prime Minister defended the cut to Universal Credit – as did his Chancellor Rishi Sunak.
The £20 uplift was to meet a crisis situation brought on by the lockdown but the poverty emergency was there long before Covid and the diagnosis, as the funding proved, is to support those in need.
There is nothing “immoral” about that but there sure is in plunging thousands into poverty by taking support away.
