SNP accused of spending £2m on NHS ‘spin doctors’ as they ‘put headlines before healthcare’

With Scotland’s NHS in perpetual crisis, Scots should not be paying the price of SNP government spin, Scottish Labour has said.

A freedom of information request has revealed that the government has racked up a bill of almost £2 million employing a team of ‘spin doctors’ assigned to the Health and Social Care brief.

The team – amounting to the equivalent of 20+ full-time staff – is charged with protecting the SNP Government’s handling of Scotland’s NHS and the botched National Care Service bill.

The amount of money spent on supporting this team amounts to the cost of recruiting 64 newly qualified registered nurses. 

With almost one in six Scots on an NHS waiting list, major infrastructure projects cancelled, targets being missed and over 4,000 nursing and midwifery posts unfilled, Scottish Labour has accused the SNP government of putting ‘headlines before healthcare’.

Scottish Labour health spokesperson Jackie Baillie said: “The facts are clear for all to see – Scotland’s NHS is in crisis and the SNP government is putting headlines before healthcare.

“With every major infrastructure project cancelled due to SNP financial incompetence and over 4,000 nursing and midwifery posts unfilled, people will be shocked to know that this SNP Government is spending almost £2m of public money to defend their disastrous stewardship of our NHS.

“This money could be used to pay for scores of frontline nurses – instead it is spent on spin doctors.

“The people of Scotland should not pay the price of SNP spin.”