ALL of us will have reasons to be grateful for the NHS. It’s why it’s so close to our hearts.

Day in, day out our doctors and nurses perform heroic acts across Scotland. These are the people who go the extra mile to patch us up when we’re sick and in need.

But the truth of the matter is this - the health service in under increasing strain.

The pressures in general practice, in recruitment, in capacity are only getting more acute and so we need a plan of action to secure our health service now and for the decades to come.

Quite simply, in order to keep pace with demographic change and to keep standards of care high, we need to inject more resources into the NHS.

That’s why I used my speech at last week’s Scottish Conservative conference in Edinburgh to propose the idea of a triple lock for the health service – that NHS spending should rise each year by whatever is highest: inflation, 2% or by the extra funding coming from Westminster.

We need this NHS guarantee because over the last few years the SNP have been selling our hospitals short.

Between 2010 and 2015 spending on the health service in Scotland failed to keep pace with increases down south. Shockingly, during that period the health budget rose by 7% in England, but by only 1% in Scotland.

I want this to change. I want to see every penny passed on so that we can safeguard frontline services.

Because while it remains the case that most people’s experience of the NHS is a positive one, when cracks emerge, the consequences are severe.

Take the reports in last week’s Evening Times that neurological patients at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital had operations cancelled because a sewage leak rendered recovery rooms unusable.

Or, as one surgeon reportedly told a patient, “your operation is cancelled because there is brown stuff running down the walls”.

This is the second plumbing incident to have hit the unit in the last month with staff telling this paper that as it stands they wouldn’t want their family to have surgery at the Institute of Neurosciences.

While every step has been taken to ensure patient safety isn’t compromised, this sorry tale owes more to the time of Florence Nightingale than 21st century medicine.

It stands to reason, therefore, that just as the NHS care for us, so too must we care for the NHS.

But over the last few years, the Scottish Government failed to pass on hundreds of millions of pounds that could have been used to improve our hospitals and modernise care.

My party wants to see a different approach. We will demand that the next Scottish Government backs our NHS guarantee and takes the necessary steps to ensure Scotland’s health service is fit for purpose.

After all, it’s what hard-pressed staff deserve and what patients want to see.