Rhoda Grant calls for health boards to be given more responsibility to provide 24-hour services

28 April 2010

Highlands and Islands Labour MSP Rhoda Grant has called for health boards to be given more responsibility to deliver better 24-hour services for the communities they serve.

Mrs Grant and her fellow MSPs on the Scottish Parliament’s Health and Sport Committee are concerned that trust and confidence in the NHS 24 out-of-hours service have been lost.

They say that in the current economic climate, and as a consequence of the inflexibility of the GP contract, cost pressures play a part in NHS boards’ decisions, potentially to the detriment of those services.

Mrs Grant said: "There remains, therefore, a substantial degree of work to be done to re-build confidence in NHS 24, in order to ensure that it operates as a fully effective element of the out-of-hours range of services.

"This confidence can only be achieved when the system can be depended on to work properly, which will require out-of-hours services to be fully joined up – which they are not currently.

"NHS boards should be given the responsibility for devising, and enabled to deliver, specific, sustainable and often innovative arrangements whereby out-of-hours services meet the needs of individual communities."

She added: "In areas where effective solutions have been found, such as Lochaber and Wester Ross, it has been as a result of community buy-in, integration of services, and practitioners sharing the responsibility for out-of-hours care at a local level.

"A solution based on these principles should be found for similar communities."

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