Today we have a report on Scottish health spending published by the The Centre for Public Policy in the Regions with the somewhat less than staggering conclusion "it was hard to measure the effect of the extra spending."
This is another attempt to grab headlines with a report of little substance from the CPPR duo of Maclaren and Armstrong. The main beneficiary appears to be the KPMG sponsors, who get free advertising for their blatant consultancy sales pitch. As if they are not already making enough cash at the taxpayers expense.
Our response warns that the report makes crude comparisons to criticise so-called productivity in Scotland like the earlier Nuffield report. Even this report accepts that the Nuffield numbers don't stack up. More importantly it confuses health improvement with spending on the NHS. Improving public health requires a whole range of action and involves spending from other areas including income support, housing, social work, early years etc.
This kind of ill-informed report does not properly respond to the real health issues affecting Scotland and should not be used to justify slashing NHS spending.
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