Patients are waiting too long for treatment while government spends on spin doctors.
The Scottish Government has spent almost £2 million on spin doctors for the NHS as the health service descends into chaos and expires on its feet, as do too many of its patients, for want of money.
SNP ministers splashed out £1.9 million on press or communication support for its health and social care portfolio in the 2023-24 financial year.
If ever a council department needed money it must surely be the Health and Social Care Department in West Dunbartonshire which has shown itself to be un utter failure since the SNP government imposed it on local authorities.
The fact that it had earmarked Ben View in Dumbarton for swingeing cuts which have put this vital service for elderly and vulnerable people out of business is just one example of the cack handed way that committee goes about things. Some of the members, including the chairperson, haven’t even been elected.
This involved 29.4 full-time equivalent staff who were tasked with dealing with media inquiries or writing up press releases. Scottish Labour accused the SNP Executive of putting “headlines before healthcare” following this revelation.
The Scottish Government has said effective communication allows people to understand key public services and promote “better health”. However, Scottish Labour’s health spokeswoman Dame Jackie Baillie said the figure could be used to recruit around 64 nurses.
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “We are investing more than £19.5 billion in health and social care services, with NHS staffing levels at a record high – 186,347 staff were employed as of December 2023 and nursing and midwifery numbers are up 17.8% since September 2006 – from 10,100.4 whole-time equivalent (WTE) to 66,883.6 WTE.
“Effective communication to help people understand policies and access public services, or to prompt behaviour change and promote better health, is a key part of government work. Communications professionals working on areas related to health and social care perform a variety of roles.
“These include managing campaigns to communicate important public health information, delivering a high-quality response service to meet round-the-clock demands of news organisations, assisting journalists and facilitating interviews that help hold ministers to account.”
Spin doctors, at least not those employed by West Dunbartonshire Council, are not my favourite people at the moment, as regular readers of The Dumbarton Democrat will be well aware of.
But then neither is the Labour administration in Church Street or their predecessors from the SNP, who first banned The Democrat for asking for the volume to be turned up in the council chamber and criticising the fact that there was no provision made for the press to cover their meetings from a bench where they could actually see who was speaking and what was going on.
I am an old spin doctor myself and a veteran journalist and I have worked at the highest level in the Westminster, Brussels and Holyrood parliaments and for every national newspaper in the UK and many others in Europe and elsewhere.
I know what spin doctoring is about and it’s not effective communication to help people understand policies and access public services, it’s for minding the backs of politicians who are either not clever enough or just too lazy to look after themselves when faced with an inquisitive media armed with tough questions.
That’s what we are paying for in West Dunbartonshire, a cool £500,000 a year. If it’s not that then if they were doing their job the comms team at the council would be contacting us to correct this and we would gladly do so on this digital news platform.
But the curmudgeonly chief communications officer, Amanda Graham, refuses to speak with us. At all. Never. Her strategy appears to be one of ‘never apologise, never explain’, at least not to us despite the fact that we apologised to her after telling her to bugger off when she was, along with the other highly paid suits, throwing me out of a meeting for having done something I never did.
Don’t get me wrong. West Dunbartonshire Council needs Ms Graham, but the ongoing, successful daily publication of The Dumbarton Democrat proves that we don’t need her comms team or those local councillors who appear to have abandoned democracy when it comes to communications and public empowerment. I suppose we will have to tolerate her or whoever fills her role until she comes down off her high horse.