Report to the People
10th October 2005
Health
Equality
Holyrood’s newest MSP - Cathcart
by-election victor, Charlie Gordon - wasn’t the only new face in the Scottish
Parliament last week. On Tuesday,
the debating chamber played host to leading philanthropists, who were being
honoured at the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy ceremony - the first time
the prestigious event has been held in Scotland.
Once Charlie’s swearing-in
and the awarding of medals to the great and the good were out the road, though,
it was quickly back to business as usual.
For me, that unsurprisingly
meant returning to the NHS.
As I mentioned a few weeks
ago, the big issue in the coming parliamentary session is going to be health
inequalities - official-speak for saying that, the poorer you are, the sicker
you are and the younger you die.
If we are to reduce these
inequalities, you’d think it would be obvious that the most money should be
spent where people have the poorest health.
While this, to some extent, is supposed to happen already, when appearing
before the Health Committee to give evidence on his landmark report, Professor
David Kerr acknowledged that the current arrangements instead lead to widening
health inequalities.
Last week, therefore, I
questioned the Health Minister about how we turn this around.
Surely, I argued, if we’re serious about health equality, we need to
revisit how funds are distributed. You
can’t justify pouring money into making the healthiest healthier, while people
in communities like ours are dying in their 50s and 60s.
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