Meeting of the Parliament 20 September 2023
What a cold, managerial speech with no empathy for families that was from the minister.
I draw members’ attention to my entry in the register of members’ interests—I am a practising NHS general practitioner. We are disillusioned with the Scottish Government’s stewardship of our NHS and the indifference shown by successive SNP health secretaries to many well-documented calls by local communities to support critical services.
Here we are yet again: 12,000 people support Lynne McRitchie’s petition to reconsider downgrading University hospital Wishaw’s award-winning neonatal services. The Scottish Government remains unconcerned. I ask the cabinet secretary to look the families in the gallery in the eye and tell them the truth. He does not care about their opinion.
Currently, Scotland has eight intensive care neonatal units. Under the Scottish Government’s centralisation plan to abandon rural communities, that will be reduced to three—Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth university hospital, Edinburgh royal infirmary and Aberdeen maternity hospital.
Of course, the SNP has form when it comes to forcing mothers and babies to travel vast distances for care. In NHS Highland, women in Caithness and Sutherland have faced round trips of more than 200 miles to access obstetrics and gynaecology services in Inverness. Further along the Moray Firth, Dr Gray’s hospital in Elgin has not had a consultant-led maternity unit since Shona Robison was health secretary. Over the past five years, the majority of Moray mothers have had to face a 90-minute trip east to Aberdeen or an hour’s trip west to Inverness. From Wishaw to the Borders and from Moray to Portree, maternity services across Scotland should be provided with the resources that they need to provide crucial care to newborn babies.
Scotland is so much more than its three biggest cities. More than 4 million people live elsewhere, with around 1 million Scots living in rural and island communities. Services need to be designed, resourced and optimised accordingly. Being wedded to centralisation, apathetic to local needs, will not wash.
The Scottish Government has also ridden roughshod over neonatal patient safety by way of its May 2022 directive to health boards, which limits the use of off-framework agency nurses. I understand the need to restrict the use of agency staff and control costs, but at a time when the Scottish Government has made a mess of workforce planning, and with a soaring 6,000 nursing vacancies, the consequences of coming down hard result in unsafe staffing levels.
The directive came into force on 1 July. What has been the impact? As of 17 September, an off-framework agency—just one—tells me that, due to new controls, it has been unable to place nurses in more than 300 neonatal shifts since 1 July. Managers are openly saying that understaffing will just have to be accepted and that it is on the staff. In total, across general medical and surgical wards over the same period, the agency has been unable to fill more than 7,500 shifts because of the Scottish Government’s directive.
We have neonatal intensive care agency nurses being brought up from London to Scotland to cover shifts. We are told that neonatal staffing levels in several regions are dangerously low. We know of a paediatric cardiac consultant whose cases were cancelled due to staff shortages that could not be backfilled under the new directive.