Does the NHS perform better under Labour and the Tories in Wales and Westminster than The SNP Scottish Government does? No.

In Wales Labour has been responsible for the NHS for decades. In Westminster the Tories were most recently responsible for the NHS in England from 2010 to 2024. And in Scotland it’s The SNP. But irrespective of whose responsible, Westminster decides the budget. So how does each party manage with the same Tory (and now Labour) Austerity?

A&E Performance

A standard measure used by all nations is the proportion of people attending A&E who have to wait more than 4 hours. In this respect, during the SNP Scottish Government, Scotland’s NHS A&E has consistently out-performed Labour Wales and Tory England.

From the chart above you can see that Westminster Austerity and significant underfunding of the NHS has badly affected all nations – so all have declined in performance. But still the NHS under The SNP in Scotland has performed better.

In fact Wales under Labour has consistently performed the worst of all the nations.

NHS Dentists

An often quoted measure of NHS Dentists performance is how many people are registrered for treatment. This is not actually something that Westminster measures in England, or Labour in Wales. This is probably because in England and Wales, NHS Dentists are tracked and funded using “Units of Dental Activity” (UDAs) and not how many people they’ve registered. Dentists negotiate a bunch of UDAs and they are paid to deliver these. There’s no direct incentive to register people for treatment.

In Scotland Dentists receive a regular payment for every NHS patient that is registered with them, so they are motivated to provide preventive checkups as required and lack of UDAs is no barrier to treatment.

Its not surprising, then, that the number of adults registered with NHS Dentists in England and Wales is shockingly low – and those Dentists aren’t particularly interested in increasing this. Crucially, they only see patients at the point of treatment and there isn’t the same continuity of preventative care that we see in Scotland.

In Scotland under The SNP some Health Boards have achieved 100% of adults registered with an NHS Dentist! The average currently stands at 97%.

So it’s not possible to directly compare the performance of NHS Dentistry across the nations using levels of registeration. The common measure of “participation” used here is the proportion of adults who have seen a Dentist in the previous 24 months.

Again, despite the overall negative impact of Westminster Austerity, NHS Dentists have performed much better under The SNP in Scotland than under Westminster in England.

Sources

A&E Wait Times (all nations): https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthcaresystem/articles/accidentandemergencywaittimesacrosstheuk/2024-02-28

Dental data (Scotland): https://publichealthscotland.scot/publications/dental-statistics-registration-and-participation/dental-statistics-nhs-registration-and-participation-24-january-2023/

(England): https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/nhs-dental-statistics