The leader of the Scottish Conservatives will draw on her experience of being hit by a truck to call for higher NHS spending in Scotland.
Ruth Davidson, who was seriously injured aged five in the crash outside her family home in Fife, is to tell today’s Conservative conference in Edinburgh of her chance encounter last month with the man who saved her life.
She will then demand the SNP introduce a triple-lock “NHS guarantee” that health funding will rise each year.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister is to let rip at the SNP by calling them “spendthrift, out-of-touch, dogmatic, inept nationalists”.
Ms Davidson said the surgeon who treated her 32 years ago introduced himself to her a few weeks ago on The Mound in Edinburgh before she hugged him. She said many feel the same way about those working in the NHS, but the pressures on the service are “only getting more intense”.
“At a time when the population is ageing and demand rising, the NHS needs our support,” she is expected to say.
“That’s why we propose today that the Scottish Government backs a new NHS guarantee. Spending on our health service should rise each year by whatever is highest: inflation, 2% or by the extra funding coming from Westminster. Every penny passed on.”
The Scottish party is tipped to give Labour a run for their money in May’s Holyrood election.
A YouGov poll last month showed the Conservatives and Labour neck-and-neck, although the latest survey by TNS this week found the latter well adrift.
Labour MSP Neil Findlay called on Ms Davidson to use her speech to apologise to every Scot who have been “hit” by the UK’s Conservative Government.
SNP MSP Linda Fabiani said: “Rather than helping matters, David Cameron’s day trip north is sure to be filled with the same right wing rhetoric and devotion to austerity that pushed Tory support to its lowest point in Scotland since 1865.”
A spokesman for Health Secretary Shona Robison said: “Health spending per head in Scotland is already 5% higher than in England, and we are committed to increasing frontline health spending every year with the NHS budget in Scotland now at a record level of almost £13 billion, despite Tory cuts.”