The Scottish Greens have called for an increased focus on the wellbeing of healthcare staff, including a four-day working week, as the party launched its manifesto for the May Scottish Parliament Elections.

The party, which won six seats in Holyrood in 2016, has supported the minority SNP government in crunch votes in exchange for concessions in a range of areas over the past five years.

In their manifesto, Scottish Green co-leaders Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie say that they pushed the government into legislation on NHS staffing and ensuring that all nurses have a legal right to funded continuous professional development.

In the first of an election series, healthandcare.scot takes a look at the some of the party’s key health and social care pledges.

Working conditions

A 12.5% boost to nurses’ salary is being backed by the Scottish Greens, up from the Scottish government’s pre-election promise of 4%. The party wants to see dedicated mental health support and counselling for all health and care workers, and a new occupational health body to protect NHS Scotland workers. The manifesto pledges that Green MSPs will support the transition to a four-day working week ‘with no loss of pay’.

Social care in need of a ‘radical overhaul’

Scotland’s care system is ‘in crisis’, according to the Greens. Their prescription includes working with other parties to create a National Care Service, with a long-term aim to ‘remove the private sector from the provision of care’. More immediately the party is promising to end competitive tendering, backing calls to boost carers’ pay to £15 an hour and is in favour of national pay bargaining for the care sector.

The Scottish Greens say they will recognise the role of unpaid carers by ensuring they have access to things like training, equipment and respite breaks, as well as health checks.

Mental health

Following the experience of the pandemic, the party says it would work towards increasing mental health funding to 10% of frontline NHS spending by 2026, which is estimated to provide an extra £235m a year.

For child and adolescent mental health services, the Scottish Greens are calling for an additional £161m by 2026, dwarfing the £120m announced this year by the Scottish government and heralded as the ‘single largest investment in mental health in the history of devolution’.

Health services

In a focus on community and family health, the Scottish Greens say at least 11% of health spending should be going to GPs ‘by end of the next parliament’, up from current levels of just under 7%, alongside the expansion of practice teams to include welfare rights officers, community links workers, and mental health clinicians.

The Scottish Greens are backing the decriminalisation of abortion, mandatory health warnings and calorie labelling on alcohol and ‘safe and compassionate’ assisted dying laws for adults who are terminally ill.

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