This week, Advertiser columnist Ruth Wishart reflects on the continuing value of the NHS as it reaches its 70th birthday.

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Since birthdays are traditionally a moment for celebration, I’m happy to go along with raising a cheer for the National Health Service at 70.

Locally, there will be some resistance to putting out too much bunting, since there has been an ongoing tussle over the years to stop the Vale of Leven Hospital being salami-sliced out of meaningful existence.

And of course there was the public inquiry not so many years ago into the appalling problems caused by the C difficile infection on these premises.

But if we raise our eyes above local concerns, there is much to be thankful for.

Scotland has not chosen to go down the route of NHS England, where health care has been fragmented and atomised, and subject to complicated and expensive bidding processes where healthcare has been out sourced to private providers.

In addition to which, local commissioning groups of health care professionals have to divert their attention into drawing up commercial contracts, when that is hardly their main area of expertise – or enthusiasm for that matter.

In an area of public spending where people are routinely urged to make “efficiency savings”, we might reasonably query how efficient it was of the NHS in England to pay out millions in compensation to the billionaire Richard Branson, who sued them when his Virgin Care company failed to gain another lucrative contract.

Yes, that is the same Virgin Group whose transport arm (with Stagecoach) has just lost the contract for the East Coast railway line from London to Edinburgh since it was unable to make enough money from the contract it won there.

There is a bit of a pattern here. Just last week, an inquiry – led, as it happens, by a prominent Tory supporter – concluded that breaking up the probation service by giving a private contractor half of it had proved a disastrous and expensive mistake.

Once again the private sector had wildly over promised and damagingly under-delivered.

And, of course, we’ve had only-too-vivid examples of incompetence in the delivery of public services by inexperienced contractors when the French company tasked with testing benefits claimants had to be removed from the scene after it presided over catastrophically flawed decision making.

Back in the field of health care, NHS Scotland is not a perfect service by any stretch. And at primary care level most of us could offer horror stories about the level of “service” offered by out-of-hours provider NHS24.

But when you look across the pond at the wholesale assault on accessibility to basic health provision in an America where any kind of chronic illness or sudden emergency can literally bankrupt families, there is much for which we can still be thankful.

Over the years I’ve had a few residential encounters with our health service. I’ve had good surgical and post-surgical care by health service workers who still offered a cheery presence in the midst of stressful working conditions.

Now they’ve been given a half decent pay rise. They’ve earned it. Happy birthday.