Meeting of the Parliament 02 November 2016
I declare an interest as my wife and daughter both work in the NHS.
No member in the chamber should be under any illusion that the publication of the Audit Scotland report last week was a watershed for the NHS in Scotland. For years, patients, staff, families, elected representatives and trade unions have known about the mounting pressures that the NHS is facing, and every one of us has been lobbied by people who want to raise their personal concerns. Many of those concerns have been dismissed by ministers who respond with robotic statements in which they reel off numbers and percentages from their ministerial briefing folder, all of which are unrecognisable to the patients, the staff and the dogs on the street who all know full well the impact of those pressures on their loved ones.
Audit Scotland has confirmed once and for all that none of those concerns are attempts to scaremonger, talk down staff or undermine our greatest public service. They simply reflect the material reality that NHS patients and staff experience every day. I hope that the Government starts to listen and take responsibility. We want no more diversionary tactics, no blaming of someone else and no wishing away the array of problems that the report exposes.
Early on, the report gets to the heart of the issue when it states:
“NHS funding is not keeping pace with increasing demand and the needs of an ageing population.”
The First Minister and the cabinet secretary claim that record funding is going into the NHS. In that case, is not the Audit Scotland report a damning indictment of the mismanagement and ineffectiveness of that funding? A football club owner or manager can put record funding into a team, but if the results continue to be poor, those who pay their wages rightly call for their head.
The truth is that health inflation is at 6 per cent and demand is rising, yet boards have received just over 1 per cent. Only one standard of eight has been met; agency spend is up; vacancy rates are soaring; there is a GP crisis; and social care is on the brink. In the real world, that means that more people are finding themselves in the same situation as my constituent James Neilson—mentioned at First Minister’s questions last week—who is unable to walk because of a blocked artery and has been told that he must wait for more than 30 weeks just to be assessed. More people are stuck in hospital when they should be at home; mental health patients are going through crisis with no support; and more and more people are unable to get a GP appointment.
The tragedy is that there are thousands more James Neilsons out there. NHS Lothian has already warned us that it will fail to meet most of its treatment time guarantees as result of the so-called efficiencies that it has to make. When will we stop hearing ministers and civil servants misleading the public? If they cannot meet legally binding treatment time guarantees, they should—for heaven’s sake—stop taking the people for fools by calling those cuts “efficiencies”.
It is people who suffer when targets are not met, it is people who suffer when the workforce is under pressure, and it is people who suffer when they cannot get an appointment with their GP.
I direct my final comments to the Tory party. That the Tories should come to this chamber to lecture anyone about the national health service—the greatest piece of social legislation ever introduced—is beyond satire. They would privatise the NHS, outsource it, sell it off and break it up in a heartbeat.
We must invest in our public services. We must use our resources effectively. The Audit Scotland report suggests that the Government is failing miserably on both counts.
16:55