Hansard

I am grateful for the opportunity to use Scottish Labour’s debate time to stand up for our NHS. The motion is titled “Standing up for NHS Staff and Patients” and highlights key challenges and risks that face our health service.

Governance issues and resource pressures are unprecedented and put our most precious public service in jeopardy. That deserves the full attention of Parliament and not for just a couple of hours. We all rely on and are grateful to the NHS and we all have constituents who lobby us to raise their experiences in Parliament.

It is a troubling reality that our health service is not always available to us at the point of need. We have been told that by families who have been bereaved by suicide in Tayside; by chronic pain patients who have travelled to this Parliament from all over Scotland; by staff whistleblowers in Glasgow, Highland, Ayrshire and Lothian; by organisations worried that delays in diagnosing cancer are risking survival rates, including Cancer Research UK and this Parliament’s cross-party group on cancer. Audit Scotland has warned that the Scottish Government’s 2020 vision for the NHS will not be met.

In her questions to the First Minister before recess, Alison Johnstone nailed it when she outlined the growing gap between resources and demand and the pressure that our amazing NHS staff are under. The Green amendment rightly highlights the challenges that are faced in achieving the 2020 vision, which is in no small part due to the growing gap between available resources and growing pressures. We would gladly have supported Alison Johnstone’s amendment.

In his amendment, Miles Briggs rightly draws attention to staff wellbeing. Many of us attended a round-table meeting that Miles Briggs hosted in the Parliament, at which Brian Connolly—the father of Lauren Connolly, a junior doctor from East Kilbride, who died on her way home from work—addressed us and asked us to do something to help not only junior doctors but everyone on the front line of our health service. Minutes from the Scottish Government working group on the issue indicated that it would not be possible to achieve the 48-hour working week and maintain safe staffing levels without a 35 per cent increase in junior doctor numbers, which is an increase of approximately 2,200 more doctors. We are happy to work on a cross-party basis on issues like that, in order to improve staff wellbeing and the working culture within our NHS. Therefore, we will support Miles Briggs’s amendment.

We also want to work with the Scottish Government. I urge ministers to be more willing to work with Opposition parties to address those fundamental concerns about working culture and the impact of resource pressures.

Today, we have had many briefings—including those from the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing—that are clear on the challenges and the solutions. There must be no more sticking plasters. We need to address immediate problems, such as long waiting times and delayed discharge. However, we need strong leadership, governance and a culture that values collaboration, openness and transparency, so it was disappointing to see the Scottish Government’s attempt to wreck our motion. The motion reflects the serious concerns of patients and families, NHS staff, trade unions and professional bodies, and third sector groups that often fill the gaps and pick up the pieces when people are let down. Yet, ministers have used their amendment to delete all those concerns. That “nothing to see here” attitude is an insult to patients and staff.

Let us look at the laundry list of problems on the cabinet secretary’s desk. The Queen Elizabeth university hospital and the sick kids in Edinburgh need no further commentary. The legal 12-week waiting time guarantee has been broken over 250,000 times. The cabinet secretary’s much-vaunted waiting times improvement plan has missed its promised milestones and abjectly failed to improve patient waiting times; instead they have got worse.

The 62-day cancer waiting time target has not been met since 2012. The most recent statistics show that NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and NHS Lothian also failed to meet the 31-day cancer treatment time target.

The 18-week waiting time target for child and adolescent mental health services has not been met while Nicola Sturgeon has been First Minister and, last year, over 5,000 young people waited too long. The most recent figures have shown performance falling again, with more than a third of young people waiting more than 18 weeks for a first appointment.

In 2019, almost 7,000 operations were cancelled because hospitals could not cope.

Despite repeated promises to end delayed discharge, patients are still spending thousands of unnecessary days in hospital when they should be at home. Figures for December showed a 6 per cent increase compared to the year before, and delays to hospital discharge have cost the NHS almost £200 million since the cabinet secretary took up her post.

I want to mention chronic pain. Thousands of patients who are living with chronic pain are regularly being forced to wait over four months to get a first appointment at a pain clinic, but in the past financial year, services received only £27,000 in additional waiting times improvement funding. Dorothy-Grace Elder and members of the cross-party group on chronic pain are having to pursue answers through freedom of information requests just to get standard information on waiting times. I pay tribute to them and to patients, such as Catherine Hughes, who are exhausted but are fighting the good fight because they do not want other patients to go through the same. I urge the cabinet secretary to find the time to meet that group and those patients.

Many issues in our health service have come to light thanks only to the tenacity of brave whistleblowers, patients and journalists, who have asked the hard questions and not been fobbed off by health board and Scottish Government spin. I pay tribute to families affected by the tragedies and serious events at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital. They have shown us what courage looks like.

Many journalists are involved in that, but I have been speaking to Hannah Rodger from The Herald and Herald on Sunday. She has spent more than a year using freedom of information to get access to specific information about the handling of outbreaks at the Queen Elizabeth, and she has faced repeated resistance from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. It is concerning that other bodies, including Health Protection Scotland, are following suit in their reluctance to provide information. There is more hiding behind patient confidentiality and legal excuses, yet they break those exemptions when the timing suits, to serve their own spin or narrative.

NHSGGC told Hannah Rodger that there was nothing new in the leaked reports that she was passed detailing the warnings about wards not being purpose built, the fact that the ventilation system throughout the campus might be exacerbating the spread of infection, and the concerns that information was missing from building logs. We got to the point at which the cabinet secretary called a public inquiry, but it should not have taken a year of campaigners, journalists and others meeting brick walls.

It feels as though patients and families are taking on the medical establishment—in fact, at times, it is like a medical mafia. Speaking out and standing up against their shocking treatment by the health board has meant that some staff have lost their jobs; that is the reality. Worryingly, the problems with transparency are not isolated to one health board or one part of Scotland. Sarah Boyack, Daniel Johnson and Anas Sarwar, who will speak in the debate, have all been tenacious in standing up for patients and staff in their areas.

We have the ridiculous and scandalous situation of the new sick kids hospital in Edinburgh lying empty and unable to treat a single patient, even though the health board is paying millions of pounds to the contractor for it. It is right that there will be a public inquiry into the construction of those hospitals in both Glasgow and Edinburgh. The dots needs to be joined, we need accountability and lessons must be learned.

In other health boards, such as NHS Tayside, so many families have had their lives turned upside down by the tragedy of suicide. Families have felt shut out and let down by the decisions of NHS Tayside. The Strang report, which we discussed in the chamber before recess, is a hopeful step towards changing that for good.

Miles Briggs’s amendment notes the Sturrock review, which highlights the culture of bullying and harassment in our NHS that needs to be stamped out.

I mentioned the Strang report, which was fuelled by the courage of families who have spoken out. Some of them are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder themselves. I pay tribute to Gillian Murray, Mandy McLaren and others. It is not just a Tayside issue; the Minister for Mental Health is aware that there are patients who are our constituents in Lanarkshire who are saying the same things. That is why Gillian Murray in Tayside is working with Karen McKeown in Lanarkshire to petition the Parliament to make sure that the fragmentation among services for mental health and substance use ends and that we get to a point at which there is no wrong door—we are far away from that.

In the motion, we talk about health boards being in special measures. There is nothing special about that. The only thing spectacular about it is the fact that it has become so unprecedented. So many opportunities have been missed to step in and support boards and to have a deep dive into some of the problems. So many chief executives and chairs have resigned or been moved on that it feels like a game of NHS musical chairs.

We need a plan for reform, not a Government that shies away from acknowledging the challenges that we face. We need the Government to be open and transparent and to set the bar so that our health boards operate at a high level. We must end the culture of secrecy. That is why I am disappointed that the Government amendment seeks to delete all those concerns. I want the people of Scotland to know that not just the Labour Party, but all of us as a Parliament, with the support of the Government, will stand up for the NHS, no matter what. We will stand up for patients and for staff.

I move,

That the Parliament has serious concerns about governance, leadership, performance and financial sustainability within the health service, noting that six territorial NHS boards are at level three or higher on the performance escalation framework; notes the forthcoming public inquiry into the scandals in NHS Lothian and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde; considers that challenges and risks within the NHS are not being satisfactorily addressed by the Scottish Government, to the detriment of patients and NHS staff; pays tribute to NHS staff for their dedication to patient care and is worried that more than half of doctors and nurses surveyed by BMA Scotland and RCN Scotland link heavy workloads to negative impacts on their own health; believes that the Scottish Government must be more transparent on its stewardship of the NHS, in accordance with Open Government principles, and that the culture of secrecy must end; calls on the Scottish Government to ensure that ministers are accountable to the public and staff through the chairing of annual health board meetings, and agrees that the Parliament should have the power to take evidence from all departing health board chief executives and chairpersons.