How you're paying for Scotland’s doughnut binge
With waiting times up and the country gripped by “austerity”, the NHS in Scotland is spending millions on prescribing biscuits, hot-dogs and doughnuts to coeliacs. It’s crazy, says Merryn Somerset Webb.
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I wrote here a few years ago about what I considered to be the scandal of gluten-free food prescriptions.
It seemed to me at the time a bad idea that everyone with coeliac disease (which means we can't eat gluten) should, instead of simply not eating bread, cake and biscuits, get gluten-free bread, cake and biscuits at the general public's expense.
This stuff is not only entirely unnecessary, but it is expensive and generally super-bad for you too. I didn't expect other coeliacs to agree with me (turkeys, Christmas, etc) and in general they didn't.
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But I suppose I did rather expect the dire financial state of the nation to lead to some of the excesses of entitlement nonsense to come to an end. They have not.
Look to Scotland. There the NHS is a mess. A leader in the FT today points out that waiting times for patients have shot up in the last two years with the number waiting more than 12 weeks to be seen more thandoubling, and the share of A&E patients treated within four hours constantly trending down.
So what do you think NHS Scotland is spending money on? I suspect we could make a pretty depressing list, but in a sign of just how messed up modern priorities are, part of the answer is doughnuts.
Last year, NHS Scotland spent £4.1m on prescriptions for gluten-free food. 52,000 of those were for "cookies and biscuits". 18,615 were for pizza bases. 1,139 were for hot dogs and hamburgers. And 407 were for doughnuts. Doughnuts!
Yes, if you are a UK taxpayer you are paying for someone with an unpleasant but relatively easily manageable auto-immune disease to eat things that are really, really bad for them. Via the health service. I can't believe there aren't better things to spend money on. Cancer drugs perhaps?
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