Meeting of the Parliament 15 May 2019
I thank the Liberal Democrats for using their business time for this important debate.
No one can be in any doubt that, since Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish National Party Government introduced the patient treatment time guarantee in 2011, patients and their families have been let down. I believe that it is also important to look at the wider patient treatment targets that the Scottish Government is failing to meet, which I outline in my amendment.
This is mental health awareness week. I welcome the positive campaigns to raise awareness and the need to tackle the stigma that still exists around mental health. However, the question that I am asked again and again is what the point is in trying to encourage people to come forward as they will often be failed when they seek help.
Alex Cole-Hamilton, Alison Johnstone and I represent Lothian. I am sure that they, too, will be acutely aware of the unacceptable waiting times for psychological treatment and the failure to meet the child and adolescent mental health services waiting times for our constituents. I am sure that I am not the only MSP who has parents at my advice surgeries desperately trying to navigate the CAMHS system, telling me how they have been told that the waiting time is more than a year for children and young people and two years for adults. I have to say that the parents and families whom I represent are way beyond wanting an apology from SNP ministers—they want action. Those parents and families feel abandoned by a Government that has been in office for 12 years. The situation in Lothian is getting worse, and mental health waiting times here in the capital are now beyond crisis levels, with the situation showing no sign of improvement.
Parents in Lothian have been told by general practitioners to go private if they want to access support for their children, as NHS Lothian clearly does not have the capacity to see them. Children who are in desperate need of support are being told that there is a wait of more than a year. In some cases, as the Health and Sport Committee heard recently, parents are being told that their child would likely be seen earlier if they were self-harming. Scotland’s young people—our future—are being failed.
As the co-chair of the Parliament’s cross-party group on cancer, I regularly hear about the mental health impact that suspected cancer brings to individuals, including weeks and months waiting and not knowing, sleepless nights and unimaginable stress. The latest cancer waiting times show that only 82.9 per cent of patients in Scotland with suspected cancer and an urgent referral started treatment in 62 days. As Cancer Research UK stated,
“These figures show a service under huge strain with too many patients waiting too long.”