Meeting of the Parliament 03 December 2014
We do not know where the money will come from, but local government has to find it—that is how the Scottish Government treats local government.
We have similar problems in the care home sector, where there are staff shortages and low pay, training budgets have been cut and standards are falling. Every week, there are stories in the press about neglect and the poor care of residents. Across Scotland, care home places are vacant because councils will not allocate people to them because of concern about the quality of care, yet neither the Government nor the Care Inspectorate knows the extent of the problem, because neither of them collates the information. That cannot go on. We must make social care a fairly paid, rewarding career, and we must raise standards to ensure that we genuinely shift the balance of care. That will never happen with a system that is based on a race to the bottom, as the present one is.
The two previous cabinet secretaries for health operated a denial strategy—they pretended that everything was okay when reality was staring them in the face. We now have staffing shortages across many disciplines: GPs, midwives, specialist nurses, paediatricians, psychiatrists, emergency medicine staff, anaesthetists—the list goes on. Vacancies for consultant posts have doubled, spending on locums is up by 60 per cent, spending on agency staff is up 106 per cent over the past two years and money continues to leak out of the system into the private sector. In the past few days, we have had the reports on the Vale of Leven hospital, Aberdeen royal infirmary and NHS Grampian, and there are serious issues in Fife, Lanarkshire, the Lothians and across Scotland. If ever there was a time to accept our argument for a wholesale review of our NHS and the establishment of a truly independent health regulator, that time is now. I hope that the new cabinet secretary will reject the arrogant approach of her predecessors and do exactly that.
I move,
That the Parliament commends the NHS Scotland staff who work tirelessly under increasing pressure to deliver high quality care to patients; is concerned by recent statistics that show that accident and emergency waiting time targets are being missed, the number of patients delayed over four weeks increased by 106% between October 2013 and October 2014, the number of bed days increased by 22% to 154,588 between July to September 2013 and July to September 2014 and that the BMA suggests that consultant vacancies are almost double the official figure; notes the concerns of staff regarding the ongoing scandal of 15-minute social care visits, falling standards and a race to the bottom in quality, wages and conditions, and calls on the Scottish Government to conduct a full-scale review of the NHS, as supported by the Royal College of Nursing, to address the broad range of pressures being identified in all areas of the NHS by staff and patients and to build a health service that meets the demands and needs of the 21st century.
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