Male life expectancy in Glasgow is almost 8 years less than in East Dunbartonshire. This shocking statistic is all the more potent for the fact that the two areas share a boundary. The truth, of course, is that poverty and poor health are not confined by lines on maps. We need to tackle inequalities in health wherever they exist. Everyone knows that prevention will always be better than cure. It is nearly always cheaper too.

That’s why we want to see:

• more protection for greenspace and a programme to create major new parks across Scotland.
• organisations funded by the taxpayer, be they public or private, to ensure that the bulk of the food they buy and serve is healthy local food.

Nowhere is the challenge of health improvement more important than in our schools. We’ve made great progress in improving school meals to the point that food campaigner Jamie Oliver described us as ‘light years ahead of England’. Soon we will remove junk food and fizzy drinks. But we want to go much further improving children’s health and fitness.

That’s why we want to see:

• more investment in improving school meals, ensuring that they source the bulk of their food from local producers and suppliers.
• free fruit available for all primary children and cookery classes for all children throughout their time in school.
• an hour’s physical activity every day for every child to tackle obesity and improve fitness, with more PE and exciting new activities after the school day ends.

We believe that the future of health care must be local and personal. We want to see more community health centres bringing together frontline professionals from hospitals, other health disciplines, social work and the voluntary sector working together to plan and deliver more flexible services. With more power, local health teams can do even more, all over Scotland. My priority for health in Scotland is to treat more people, more quickly, more appropriately, closer to home. Every community should have access to improved local health facilities, with a wider range of services under the same roof. Over 90% of healthcare is now delivered locally and people across Scotland are already benefiting from increased investment in local health care facilities. However, the time is right for a step change in investment to deliver excellent facilities across Scotland.

That’s why we want to see:

• a major programme of investment in Scotland’s community health facilities with 100 new and refurbished local health centres across Scotland.
• a greater role for Scotland’s existing community hospitals, expanding their capabilities in areas like minor surgery.

It is important that as much health care as possible is undertaken locally. In 2003 we made hospital waiting times a major priority so that those who had been waiting the longest got the treatment they desperately needed. Today, no one with a waiting time guarantee waits more than 6 months between referral by a consultant and treatment. From 2007 we will meet new 18 week waiting time targets. We believe that the next major challenge in reducing the wait and the worry for patients is to deliver on faster diagnosis. For the first time we now measure diagnostic waiting times. We are determined to reduce these waits. There is no good reason why many simple diagnostic tests could not be done locally. This would speed up the process considerably, meaning that the consultant sees you for the first time armed with the test results and information needed. Our focus on reducing diagnostic waiting times will lead to real reductions across the patient journey.

That’s why we want to see:

• more diagnostic tests done locally through community health facilities.
• new waiting time targets for the whole patient journey.
• more investment in diagnostic equipment and staff.