Meeting of the Parliament 03 April 2019
I echo the thanks that other members have expressed to the Conservatives for securing time for this debate and to the workforce that looks after us.
On two occasions, healthcare workers have represented the bridge between normal life and oblivion for my family. In the first case, when my eldest son was born and was not breathing, he was revived after huge complications in theatre. Secondly, and much more recently, a whole team of clinicians stayed behind after their shift had ended to operate and remove a coin that my four-year-old daughter, Darcy, had swallowed. I owe those workers the lives of my children. I am sure that I am not alone and that many people in this chamber can tell similar personal stories.
The NHS is unique in the chamber, because it attracts great love and, at times, great derision. It is important to make a separation and put on record that, as an Opposition politician—I am sure that I speak for all Opposition politicians on this—I might sometimes attack Government policy or the governance of our health boards, but I would never attack the work of our front-line staff. They are heroes in our country.
The first thing that I say in tribute to the staff is that there are not enough of them. There is a workforce crisis and it is wrong of the Government to try to amend the Conservative motion and delete the word “crisis”. Since I and many of my colleagues were elected in 2016, there have been warning lights for a range of disciplines across the workforce planning dashboard.
The issue is no more profound for me and my party than in the area of mental health. We already know about the mental health waiting lists for children and young people, but mental health is an issue of great importance for people of all ages. For example, we were going to recruit 800 mental health workers, but in the two years since that policy was announced only 106 have been recruited. To put that in context, one in four appointments with a general practitioner is made because of an underlying mental health complaint. It is no wonder that GP morale is rock bottom; they are having to deal with things that would be better solved by mental health practitioners. I ask the Government to respond to our concerns about the slow uptake of those 800 positions.
Morale is extremely important, and that feeds into it, but there are many factors that lower staff morale in our front-line NHS, whether that is having to send patients a 12-week waiting time guarantee letter when staff know that there is no hope of meeting that guarantee, or closing wards to elective surgery because there are no receiving beds for in-patients in the wider hospital due to delayed discharge. A senior neurosurgeon came to one of my constituency surgeries to talk about how low morale was in his department because of the repeated closures of his ward due to the lack of in-patient beds.
We have also heard a thing or two about safety. Alison Johnstone is absolutely right to cite the concerns of nurses who say that patient care was compromised on their most recent shift. However, it is not just about patient care, as we must recognise that staff, too, have to be kept safe. That is why we have lodged amendments to the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Bill to recognise the pre-eminence and importance of our staff’s safety.
Our approach to whistleblowing matters hugely, because we need our staff to understand that they are being listened to and believed and that there will be corrective action and culture change. The national whistleblowing helpline is not a universally accepted or well-regarded service in our NHS; we can see that in the fact that clinicians will sometimes phone national newspapers about a problem before they will phone the national whistleblowing helpline, such is their concern.
We must also thank our social care workforce and those unpaid carers who look after their loved ones. We all owe them a huge debt of gratitude.