Meeting of the Parliament 14 June 2023
I am grateful to Jackie Baillie for securing time for this important debate. I would say that I am happy to speak in it, but that would be a lie. I mean, here we are again—it is like beating your head against a brick wall. The facts that are set out in the motion make for grim reading indeed. We keep having to have this debate in Opposition time, because the Government will not get to grips with the crisis that it is presiding over.
A staggering 779,000 people are waiting for treatment, and some 7,000 of them have been waiting for more than two years. There has been a 73 per cent increase in the number of Scots who are paying for private medical treatment. The very worst statistic of all is that more than 18,000 patients died while waiting for treatment last year alone—18,000. Think about that for a second, Presiding Officer, because we are in the foothills of a public inquiry that will ascertain the root causes and decisions that contributed to the deaths of 15,000 Scots during the entirety of the pandemic. How many of those 18,000 people might be alive today were it not for the crisis that is engulfing our national health service? The stakes simply could not be higher.
I have lost count of the number of times that we have had to debate this issue in Opposition time. Whether they are forced to wait for hours for an ambulance or to be seen at A and E, left abandoned on trolleys or languishing on wards, people are being let down. I fear that we have become accustomed and desensitised to crisis and, indeed, tragedy in our health service.
It is simply not good enough. We may have a new First Minister and a new health secretary, but it is the same old, same old when it comes to ministerial disinterest and mismanagement. Did someone mention continuity? It feels as though that is what we are getting.
I want to be crystal clear from the outset that none of that is the fault of NHS staff. They have worked their socks off. They have worked for long hours, often under the most stressful conditions imaginable, and they deserve our utmost thanks—but they are being let down as well. There are currently more than 7,000 NHS workforce vacancies left unfilled. The chair of the British Medical Association Scotland, Dr Iain Kennedy, has said that doctors and other healthcare workers are “exhausted” and “facing burn-out” under increasing workloads.
Now the Government’s failure to negotiate fair pay means that junior doctors are set to strike, making things even more difficult. When he was health secretary, Humza Yousaf repeatedly rejected my party’s calls for a staff burnout prevention strategy and a health and social care staff assembly. How helpful might those have proved to be in allowing junior doctors to feel better supported and ensuring a conduit for their views to be heard? Instead, they now feel that they have no recourse other than industrial action. Let us remember that Humza Yousaf, during his leadership campaign, set great store by pointing to Scotland as the only place where NHS strikes were not happening—well, they are happening now.
Under this Government’s watch, costs for temporary staff rose to £567 million last year. It would seem that, rather than making the meaningful investment that our health service needs, this Government is relying on short-term fixes to plug the gaps. They are sticking plasters.
The SNP enjoys comparing Scotland with the rest of the UK when it suits it, which is not so with NHS waiting times. Waits in Scotland are twice the length of those south of the border. In England, around 10,000 patients have been waiting longer than 18 months for treatment; in Scotland, 21,000 have. It is no wonder, then, that so many people are turning to private medical treatment. The Government should be utterly embarrassed by that. Competent management of our health service is, perhaps, the measure of a civilised society. It is what we elect our Government to do, first and foremost. What an indictment it is, then, that people are being forced to pay to get well.
Let me say to the Government and to the health secretary: stop blaming the pandemic. It insults the intelligence and seriously tests the patience of both staff and patients. Instead, the Government must now follow the advice of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and invest in our health service, give staff the fair pay that they deserve, adopt our burnout prevention strategy and set up that staff assembly, so that doctors, nurses and junior trainees can feel heard and understood, rather than ignored and unappreciated.