By Marjory Inglis, health reporter

A DECISION on the future of the privately run surgical and diagnostic unit at Stracathro Hospital by Brechin is at least eight months away.

Health secretary Nicola Sturgeon, on a visit to Dundee this week, said the unit would remain publicly funded but whether taxpayers’ cash was given to the private sector to treat NHS patients or invested directly in the NHS was still undecided.

The former Scottish Executive agreed £18 million of funding for a three-year contract to establish the Scottish Regional Treatment Centre at Stracathro (SRTC), run by Netcare, a subsidiary of a global healthcare company.

Although privately operated, the centre treats only NHS patients drawn from all over Tayside, Fife and Grampian.

More recently patients from Forth Valley have been travelling to the unit.

The STRC was established to help cut the queues of people waiting for NHS treatment, performing surgery in the evenings and at weekends when operating theatres at Stracathro are not normally used by the NHS.

Ms Sturgeon has made several speeches regarding SNP policy on healthcare when she has ruled out significant use of the private sector. That has been seen in some quarters as a threat to the future of the privately run unit at Stracathro.

Asked if she would give a commitment to the continuation of the SRTC at Stracathro, Ms Sturgeon said, “No decision has been taken on that. There is a three-year contract in place. We are not at the end of that.

“We will take a decision in due course but that decision will not be taken before the spring of next year.”

However, she was emphatic that the STRC did have a future, pointing out the question mark was over how it would be managed.

“The decision is not will it continue or not, but how it will continue. It is publicly funded and will continue to be publicly funded but whether the funding is given to a private company to run it or given to the NHS is a decision yet to be taken.”

The recently published review of the first 10 months of the contract with Netcare concluded that as the NHS developed its own capacity to treat patients, and queues for treatment were eroded, there would be less need for a centre like the SRTC.

NHS Tayside has invested in extra permanent posts for consultants in hospital departments that were having difficulty meeting waiting times for treatment, and has put a lot of effort into redesigning the whole passage through the system from referral to treatment.

A few years ago the NHS took over a former private hospital near Glasgow and established the Golden Jubilee Hospital as a resource for the whole of Scotland to tackle waiting lists for surgery.

However, people from the north-east were reluctant to travel there, one of the reasons the SRTC was established at Stracathro.

Ms Sturgeon appeared to acknowledge that as health boards across Scotland boosted their capacity to treat their own patients, there would be a reduced need for regional centres to tackle waiting lists.

“As the NHS generally has built up its own capacity to cut waiting times there are questions about how we best use facilities,” she said.

“The Golden Jubilee possibly has some of the same questions to answer as Stracathro but there is no doubt they are very valuable facilities within the NHS and we need to make sure that stays the case.”