Meeting of the Parliament 17 January 2024
We all admire the dedication and hard work of NHS staff. Whatever help we need, they go to incredible lengths to keep us healthy, and we owe them our thanks for the work that they do. However, despite the amazing efforts of NHS staff, Scotland’s health service is in crisis.
Staff have been let down by the lack of support from the SNP Government. Systemic problems in our NHS have driven excellent nurses and doctors to breaking point. No matter how hard they work, they cannot give every patient the care that they deserve any more. That is the grim reality of Scotland’s NHS under the SNP’s leadership.
There is a crisis at practically every level of the NHS. Years of sub-par plans from the SNP, including Humza Yousaf’s flimsy NHS recovery plan, have seen the situation in our NHS spiral out of control. The SNP will blame the pandemic, but the reality is that most of these problems were already apparent before Covid; the pandemic only made them worse.
The situation in the NHS right now is that waiting times in A and E have hit record worst-ever levels. The treatment time target for A and E is four hours. However, since this session of Parliament began, that target has been missed more than 1 million times. That does not just inconvenience people, it costs lives. Last year, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said that one extra death occurs for every 72 patients who wait more than eight hours in A and E. Based on those figures, more than 1,400 people lost their lives because of A and E waiting times just to the end of September last year.
The problems at A and E have sent the ambulance service into crisis, too. Ambulances are regularly forced to queue for hours outside hospitals before they can admit a patient and get back out on the road. The consequence is people waiting absurdly long times for ambulances—even up to 15 hours.
And the issues do not end there. People are often leaving treatment until it becomes an emergency and they need to attend A and E or get an ambulance because they have not been able to get a GP appointment. They cannot get an appointment quickly because there are simply not enough GPs. The SNP’s poor workforce planning has left GPs struggling to meet demand. The British Medical Association says that we need another 1,000 GPs to plug gaps. The SNP promised to increase GP numbers, but it is going in the wrong direction.
That is not the only broken promise from the SNP on Scotland’s NHS. Perhaps most damaging has been its failure to end delayed discharge, which the Deputy First Minister said it would do nine years ago. The consequences of failing to meet that promise have been huge. Almost 2,000 beds are occupied every day due to delayed discharge.
Neither is the SNP’s failure to recruit more GPs the only serious workforce issue in Scotland’s NHS. Spending on agency staff has quadrupled in two years, there are more than 5,000 nursing vacancies in NHS Scotland, and staff turnover is at its highest rate in a decade.