SCOTLAND’S NHS is “on life support” as it faces a £1.4 billion funding gap, Labour warns today.

Data collected by the party shows Scotland’s Integrated Joint Boards (IJBs) have a combined budget gap in excess of £415 million before in-year cuts and forced savings.

Scotland’s health boards are heading for a projected accumulated deficit for the financial year 2024/25 of some £947 million.

Together, this leaves the country’s health service with a financial timebomb of almost £1.4bn, with the overall figure likely to be even higher as the information was not available for all boards.

Scottish Labour health spokeswoman Dame Jackie Baillie said: “That Scotland’s NHS is exposed to this scale of financial risk is simply unfathomable and is symbolic of 17 years of SNP failure.

“While waiting lists grow and hospital building projects are cancelled, Scotland’s NHS continues to rack up huge deficits with the SNP seemingly uninterested.”

She blamed the SNP government’s “17 years of mismanagement and financial incompetence” for threatening the future of Scotland’s NHS and social care services.    

“Make no mistake, this funding gap time-bomb has built up over years of successive SNP health ministers,” she added.

“NHS staff and social care workers are working tirelessly but targets are being missed and patients are being failed due to this SNP government.

“At the same time as thousands of Scots struggle to access desperately needed care packages, SNP ministers obsess over the controversial National Care Service Bill, which could cost as much as £2.2bn, with not a single penny going on care packages.”

It comes after the British Medical Association revealed consultant vacancies in NHS Scotland are more than twice as high as official statistics suggest and called on the Scottish government to face up to the “true scale of the problem.”