Meeting of the Parliament 02 March 2017
Thank you very much, Presiding Officer.
The Scottish Liberal Democrats are happy to welcome the debate and will support the Government motion and all Opposition amendments.
As a platform that aims to improve safety and reduce harm in any landscape where care is delivered, the Scottish patient safety programme sets an international standard. It successfully sets out an approach to safety from birth to death, at every stage and in every transaction in the delivery of health and social care in our society. I welcome the opportunity that the debate affords to scrutinise the programme’s merits in granular detail.
The welfare and safety of our citizenry must always be the alpha and omega of our responsibility as legislators, and the delivery of health and social care represents the largest landscape in which we, as public servants, must discharge that duty. Since its inception, the patient safety programme has delivered groundbreaking interventions and disseminated best practice at every level of care in our society. We heard about the prevention of sepsis through a whole-system approach to infection control, which is underpinned by robust data analysis that is building a structured approach to all frontiers of patient safety. As was said in a programme press release in early 2015:
“Patient safety problems exist throughout the NHS, as in all large complex health care systems in the world. However, it is not staff negligence, but the systems, procedures, environment and constraints faced by health care professionals that lie at the root of most safety problems.”
I think that all members share the belief that our health and social care staff represent some of the finest professionals in Scottish society. However, there is a structural problem that can run counter to the efforts of the patient safety programme and can visit symptoms on every aspect of our health service. That, in turn, impacts on the programme’s work.
Problems in workforce planning create a blockage that impedes patient flow through primary, acute and, ultimately, social care, at every stage in the health journey. A shortage of general practitioners—we know that by the end of this decade we could have nearly 1,000 fewer GPs than our society will require—leads to appointment delays, which in turn can lead to conditions becoming more acute, which then results in hospital admissions that earlier intervention could have prevented. That exerts upward pressure that is manifested in every other part of the health service, and which, coupled with the postcode lottery around the availability of social care packages, can cause delays in hospital discharge—as we heard from Anas Sarwar—on a monumental scale.
A recent volley of freedom of information requests that my office issued uncovered the extent of the problem. Some patients are staying in hospital for as many as 500 days beyond the point when they are declared fit to go home.