Official Report search · Parliament Workbench

Chamber

Meeting of the Parliament 05 December 2012

05 Dec 2012 · S4 · Meeting of the Parliament

Item of business

Health Service

Boyack, Sarah Lab Lothian Watch on SPTV

In the first eight years of this Parliament, Labour allocated huge increases to health, which enabled the system to recover from the previous round of Tory cuts and improved the patient experience, the quality and range of services and, crucially, the terms and conditions of NHS staff. Alex Neil has a cheek to criticise Labour, given that his predecessor refused to accept NHS Lothian’s plea for Edinburgh’s new sick kids hospital to be built through conventional spending. It will be years late and it will be funded under the non-profit-distributing model.

Last month, the cabinet secretary criticised NHS Lothian as being in the second division and Audit Scotland revealed that our NHS is on an amber warning. Today, the SNP’s amendment deletes that warning from the Labour motion. In fact, it deletes the problems that Jackie Baillie has correctly identified. The SNP cannot Tipp-Ex out those problems. Our challenge is to air them in the chamber and come up with solutions. Staff reductions have put massive pressure on the remaining staff and undermined the quality of care that patients receive. The fact that interns are now being used to supplement hard-pressed nurses is simply not acceptable.

The waiting times problem in Lothian has blown open the reality in our NHS today. The systematic fiddling of the figures that we have discussed before, the subversion of patients’ rights and the fact that the waiting lists were a complete fiction still need to be addressed. How on earth can the SNP Government assert that

“all NHS boards have met their financial targets on revenue and capital”?

What does that mean? It is completely fictitious. In NHS Lothian alone, the estimate earlier this year was that it would cost about £20 million just to address the backlog and deal with the hundreds of people who had not had their waiting times honoured. Last week, the board papers stated that the estimate of the amount needed is now more than £26 million. Those figures demonstrate that the capacity to meet the Government’s targets on waiting times is simply not there. To use the cabinet secretary’s phrase, there is a systemic problem.

I would be interested to hear the cabinet secretary’s comments about the level at which the NHS runs bed capacity in the light of this week’s report from the Dr Foster unit at Imperial College. It is stark:

“When bed occupancy tips the 85% mark the system goes into overdrive - and things start to give. For patients that means quality of care may suffer.”

How does that equate to what is happening in our hospitals in Scotland? It feels very much like what is happening in Lothian, where the problems have piled up one after another. Only last month, the board was forced to reopen the Royal Victoria hospital, which was mothballed earlier this year, to create the extra capacity to get us all through the winter. There simply are not the resources available to get older people out of our hospitals and into care that is appropriate for them when they need it. That is a current problem in the NHS.

Search Hansard contributions

Meeting of the Parliament 05 December 2012

In the same item of business