Hansard

I congratulate my colleague Alexander Stewart on bringing the motion to Parliament.

Everyone in the chamber will know someone who has been affected by a stroke. As strokes take an unimaginable toll not only on the patient but on their wider family, it is right that we put pressure on the Scottish Government today in order to get the best outcomes for everyone involved.

Unfortunately, we need look no further than the NHS chief executives’ responses to the Scottish stroke care audit report to see that many of Scotland’s NHS boards are underequipped. NHS Ayrshire and Arran cites

“a shortage of stroke consultants”;

NHS Borders cites too small a staff pool; and NHS Dumfries and Galloway cites a lack of “senior doctors”. So it goes on: NHS Fife, again, mentions a shortage of acutely trained staff and NHS Grampian a “reduction in Consultant numbers”, while NHS Lanarkshire says that it struggles to meet new demands.

It is clear that, although the Scottish Government has warm words for stroke patients, it is unable to back them up with results. We face the massive health inequalities that my colleague rightly highlights in his motion. The mortality rates for stroke victims in the most deprived areas is 42 per cent higher than those in the least. In no other illness will you see such a dramatic differentiation in survival.

I am not sure that we fix such a systemic problem by cutting £30 million to health boards such as Grampian. They are underfunded, underequipped and understaffed; a decade of this Government has meant a decade of failure. Given that our health boards are already at breaking point, when will the Government listen or even reflect on these matters? I am all too aware of the disparity in health outcomes in my constituency due to a lack of access to clinical and long-term care. Many constituents have been in touch about the lack of long-term care in remote areas; indeed, it is a widespread problem outside the central belt, but it is a problem that, unfortunately, the Government only ignores.

A most obvious and important example of that is thrombectomy. Although this complex procedure should be available widely, it is not even available outside Glasgow or Edinburgh. The Government’s workforce planning needs to be more imaginative. Clearly, we have a lack of radiologists available to carry out the procedure, but most of the required skills are transferable and cardiologists, for example, could be used instead. We need to be much more flexible in our response to the demands of the future.

For those lucky enough to survive a stroke, a lack of physiotherapy, speech therapy and psychological support awaits. The integration of health and social care presents an opportunity to improve that situation, but it will work only if health and social care work in effective local teams and involve third sector expertise as an equal partner in providing front-line support to stroke survivors.

Finally, other countries measure the availability and effectiveness of long-term rehabilitation, but Scotland does not. Why not?