Susan Smith responds to the news that more Scots died from several preventable health conditions last year
The number of Scots who died from alcohol last year went up, as did the number of Scots who took their own life. Despite both of these causes of death being preventable, Scottish society failed to save these lives last year. And the obvious conclusion is – prevention isn’t working.
It’s been nearly seven years since the Christie Commission on Public Services stressed the need to prioritise spending on public services that prevent negative outcomes and even longer since prevention became the buzz word for public service reform.
In that time Scotland’s local and national government has allocated hundreds of thousands of pounds to various change funds designed to shift spending over to prevention. The integration of health and social care was also supposed to be helping to make this transformation.
Yet, still, the message from third sector community and preventative services, like some of those mentioned in this week’s Alcohol Awareness Week feature, is that local authorities simply can’t afford to fund them. The question isn’t about quality, it’s about hard cash.
Two thirds of Scots who killed themselves last year asked for help in the year before they died. Yet health services and community services weren’t able to provide that.
Maybe it's not prevention that’s not working, but our commitment to it. Whether prevention and public funding cuts just don’t mix or whether the problem is that our public bodies are too set in their ways, almost a decade on, it’s just not happening. Preventative services are still too often seen as a luxury rather than a both a social and financial necessity.
Early SNP bright ideas like the local government concordat that saw an end to ring fencing have long lost their sheen, its raison d’etre has been kicked into the long-grass, and Scots are now noticing they are no richer or healthier than a decade ago.
There’s no forest of magical money trees on the brink of dropping a bed of cash into Scotland’s lap – something fundamental in our approach has to change. Until it does, Scots will continue to die needlessly.
Susan Smith is editor of Third Force News.
