Hansard

Absolutely. As I said, from the conversations that the cabinet secretary and I have had, I think that he agrees with us on that point.

Long Covid is hitting the country hard and impacting individuals, families, the labour market and the delivery of healthcare services. As the cabinet secretary said, long Covid hits patients hard; as a practising general practitioner, I have countless examples.

There is a young mum who had a job, used to run five to 10km a day and has a family, but now she can barely make it to the toilet without feeling breathless. She had no choice but to give up work, so financial pressures are coming and she has been forced to sell her house and move in with her parents.

I know a doctor in Scotland who was forced to quit because of the exhaustion and headaches, which made it impossible to function. Telephone consultations were out of the question because she was so breathless she could not do them.

Then there is our youth. More than 80,000 12 to 16-year-olds across the United Kingdom are struggling to function with long Covid.

In my Scottish Parliament maiden speech, on 27 May last year, I underscored the problem of long Covid, and on 1 June, as members of the Scottish Parliament debated the national health service recovery plan, I called on the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care to commit to establishing a specialist long Covid clinic.

Our paper, “Treating Long COVID in Scotland”, which came out shortly afterwards, sets out an action plan that includes investing in a network of specialist clinics and an app-based treatment service, ring-fencing funds for Covid care, and establishing a programme of research to discover more about the disease and its long-term impact.

Having extensively researched how regions across the UK were responding to long Covid, I recommended that the Scottish Government should take the holistic approach developed by Hertfordshire Community NHS Trust. That involves a rehab pathway with a multidisciplinary team including GPs, physios, respiratory nurses, dieticians and clinical psychologists who can refer patients to other clinics, and much of it is delivered remotely. The team in Hertfordshire freely admits that it did not get everything right. It would happily tell us how to get things going in Scotland, but I am concerned that we might want a north-of-the-border solution.

We are still waiting for a solution. On 9 September, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care announced, with a fanfare, £10 million for long Covid and a promise to deliver the best models of care to help health boards respond to the condition. Yet where are we now, in May 2022?

While England has 90 long Covid clinics—and I accept that not all have received positive feedback—Scotland does not have any. As for the £10 million to support long Covid services, that sum has been tweaked, with £3 million allocated for this year and next and more money to come. Will that new money even touch the sides? Will there be a clear audit trail on how it is spent? I hope so.

Scotland faces a tsunami of long Covid cases but the Scottish Government has not acted, and that is not lost on long Covid patients, who are suffering. I received an email this week from a man who caught Covid in 2020 and has been suffering from cognitive and visual issues for two years. No clear clinical pathway exists for him. He said that his mental health had not been looked at and that he did not feel that mental health had been part of the long Covid dialogue, yet it is crushing thousands of Scots with the condition—he knows of two long Covid sufferers who have recently died from suicide. He signed off by saying that he had watched the cabinet secretary on BBC’s “The Nine” and was deeply disappointed in the clear lack of understanding regarding the situation that sufferers face.

Today, we were hoping that the cabinet secretary had good news for the country’s 151,000 sufferers. We would welcome more detail around the role of a long Covid co-ordinator, for example on whether they would be clinical or non-clinical and whether they would be available throughout Scotland.

What would good news look like for people who are watching the debate from the public gallery and around the country? To start, we need a joined-up approach in which GPs can make speedy referrals to a Covid clinic without having to see the patients multiple times, and in which they can make multiple referrals to specialties such as occupational therapists, physios, cardiologists or respiratory specialists.

We also need to urgently create an NHS long Covid app for Scotland. We do not need to reinvent the wheel or repeat the issues of the failed Covid passport app. It should be noted that the Barts Health NHS Trust in London had an app up and running in December 2020. We should be learning from tried and tested best practice from north and south of the border or from east and west of the country—it does not matter.

In our major cities, it might still be desirable to bring specialties together under one roof, but a central belt solution does not work for the Highlands or the Borders. Many long Covid sufferers simply cannot travel, which is why the Hertfordshire model works, as it is not one size fits all.

NHS staff are going above and beyond but they cannot provide the service that patients deserve, because we are failing to tackle long Covid head on. We need to launch and operate a network of long Covid clinics. Tackling long Covid is key for the whole of Scotland, to speed its recovery from the coronavirus pandemic. Long Covid sufferers are demanding—begging for—long Covid clinics, and we need to listen to them.

We cannot support the Scottish Government’s motion, because it does not go far enough, despite some of the things that we agree with.

I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests, as a practising NHS GP.

I move amendment S6M-04472.3, to leave out from “believes” to the end and insert:

“notes that 151,000 people in Scotland are currently estimated to have long COVID in Scotland, including 64,000 who have been experiencing symptoms for more than a year; recognises that the number of people experiencing symptoms for more than a year has doubled in the last six months, and that faster action from the Scottish Government could have alleviated this and reduced the very substantial pressure on primary care; regrets the pace of the approach taken by the Scottish Government, which has seen funding allocated a full six months after it was promised; regrets that a lack of adequate data from the Scottish Government has contributed to its slow and inadequate response; notes that £10 million for all NHS boards over three financial years will be wholly insufficient to tackle the scale of the problem; regrets the Scottish Government’s continued failure to deliver specialist long COVID clinics in Scotland, meaning that people in Scotland are being left behind without access to the treatment they deserve; calls, in consequence, on the Scottish Government to deliver a network of long COVID clinics across Scotland; requests that the Scottish Government undertakes work with relevant clinical and regulatory partners to develop a long COVID clinical pathway, and asks the Scottish Government to adopt an app-based treatment service to reduce pressures on other parts of the NHS.”