Corporate Affairs

Party Manifestos

Scottish Liberal Democrats Party Manifesto

The Scottish Lib Dems have launched their manifesto for the election 2011. To view, please click here.

Lib Dems are pledging as part of their Better Health Action Plan:

• Set a new national objective on obesity. We will work with schools and community groups to increase access to sports facilities and clubs, increase the availability of dieticians in GP practices and provide better help and information for individuals and parents. We will encourage school nurses and health visitors to use the BMI data currently recorded by schools to engage more proactively with parents about their children’s diet and exercise

• Set a new target for urgent referral for cancer diagnosis. Every patient should expect to see a specialist within two weeks. We will also work to tackle the unacceptably high number of cancer cases that are only detected for the first time during emergency admission to hospital

• Improve the provision of mental health services, increase access to psychological and emotional support and reduce waiting times for psychological treatments and talking therapies. We will take steps to increase the number of qualified psychologists and psychiatrists and develop more community-based support services

• Drive forward smart investment in preventative care and health, continuing also to make progress on smoking cessation measures

• Retain NHS 24 but improve out-of-hours care across Scotland, with a particular focus on rural and remote areas,and put GPs back at the centre of the service. We will work closely with the BMA to develop their out-of-hours proposals and establish a challenge fund to allow more areas to take forward the out-of-hours options proving more popular with patients. We will explore the benefits of organising the ambulance service on a Health Board area basis and locating control rooms with other blue light services

• Expand telemedicine and eHealth to allow easier access for patients, especially in rural areas, and avoid unnecessary outpatient and inpatient activity. This will save money and improve patient care

• Make Scotland the first country to establish national-scale telehealth services and establish a specific HEAT target for all health boards, to mainstream the use of telehealth in the delivery of patient care

• Make better use of pharmacy services in the community to provide quick and easy access to healthcare out of office hours and at weekends. We will allow pharmacy applications to be handled more fairly and work towards giving pharmacists more patient information to help them improve medicine management

• Guarantee access to an NHS dentist for everyone who wants it, after working with the dental profession

• Learn from innovative international examples of best practice to ensure Scotland’s care homes provide world class levels of care and stimulus. We will ensure strict regulation of care home standards with severe penalties for breaches of these standards and explore with the regulators the scrutiny of care home operator finances

• Drive down rates of healthcare associated infection across the whole of the health service and ensure that all of Scotland’s hospitals meet scrupulous standards of cleanliness