Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 15 June 2021
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I welcome you to your place and the minister to her new position.
The consequences of Covid will live with us for a long time to come, and nowhere will those consequences be more severely felt than in our health and social care services. Failure will be measured in lives lost, life-threatening conditions undiagnosed, and mental health problems untreated. The consequences will be acutely felt by patients and their families, but they will also be felt by our front-line health and social care staff. They are more likely to be felt by women. It will be your gran, your mum, your sister, your daughter, your wife, your civil partner, your aunt or your girlfriend who will confront those consequences and those inequalities.
Across Scotland, we are facing an escalating mental health crisis that is made worse by repeated failures by the SNP Government. Women are nearly twice as likely as men to confront the dark cloud of depression. One in five women suffers depression during pregnancy. That is not only adult women. A study by Mindwell concluded that gender differences that can impact girls’ mental health start to emerge at the age of 12.
That is why the sudden and shocking surge in treatment times for child and adolescent mental health services must be urgently addressed by ministers. The campaign group Engender warns that women and girls have faced significant barriers to good mental and physical health for decades and that women are often missed by health services or by public health awareness campaigns. I hope that the Scottish Government’s women’s health plan comes forward with robust interventions.
The shortcomings in relation to social care are also more likely to impact women. In Scotland, twice as many women as men live in long-term care.
The Scottish Conservatives welcome many of the findings of the Feeley review of social care. However, as we explore the creation of a national care service, we must reach beyond the vague but worthy goal of a system that is based on human rights. We must look towards a system that is designed around the needs of the individual, that marries traditional approaches with new technology and that supports home-based care so that more older women can live independently at home and for longer. It should be a system that tackles the staffing and recruitment crisis and fixes the funding formula once and for all.
When we talk about recovery, we need to recognise the impact that Covid has had on staff in social care and in our NHS, the vast majority of whom are women. In fact, 11 per cent of working women in Scotland, compared with just 3 per cent of working men, work in our NHS. When our NHS staff talk of stress and strain, we must remember that it is women who are most likely to be at the front line.
We must do more to close the gender pay gap in our health and social care services. On average, women earn 18.2 per cent less than men in our NHS. That gap is widest in admin functions and personal and social care services.
My colleague Annie Wells rightly set out the areas in which women are being failed in relation to diagnosis and access to primary care. Women’s health problems are too often dismissed, underestimated or simply diagnosed too late. Women who work in our NHS and care services are often stressed out, burnt out, undervalued and underpaid relative to men. We need to recognise those problems, and we in the Parliament need to resolve them. If concerted action today is one of the few silver linings of the Covid pandemic, we must work together to take it.
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