Meeting of the Parliament 19 February 2020
Not at this time. I need to make some progress.
I recognise that the departures of Tim Davison and Brian Houston, coming as they do, side by side, will create a massive leadership gulf in NHS Lothian, but I am conscious that we have some organisational memory left there.
There are warning lights across the dashboard of our NHS. We see that day in, day out in our constituency surgeries, including in cases where there are breaches of the 12-week waiting time guarantee. We hear that people, who are sometimes in abject pain, have been asked to wait 40 or 50 weeks for basic surgery even though they are clutching the letter that we still cruelly send them to say that they have a legal right to be seen within 12 weeks.
Not only that, but the systems for mailing things out to people are still stuck in the 1970s. A lady came to see me who had had a referral for suspected mouth cancer. At the top of the referral letter that she was clutching was an admission that it had been dictated in October and typed up in December. Delays of that kind, which are caused by information sitting in a dictaphone somewhere, cost lives.
I have previously referenced Dr Patrick Statham, my meeting with whom was the first time that I had had a consultant neurosurgeon come to my surgery to complain about delayed discharge. He is turning people away from the Western general hospital every single week because there are insufficient in-patient beds in that hospital due to its inability to discharge well patients into social care packages in the community.
That is typified by the constituents whose issues I have raised several times. George Ballantyne was declared well but had to wait 150 nights in the Liberton hospital at a cost of £500 a night for the want of a care package that would have cost £80 a night. That is the myopic problem in the integration agenda and we all need to address it.
The problem is that we do not value social care staff enough. The recognition that we pay people more to stack shelves in a supermarket than to provide round-the-clock intimate care to some of our most vulnerable citizens is an outrage. It is part of the reason why there is an interruption of flow throughout the health service, which is evident in our A and E delays and the waiting times problems there.
I will speak about NHS Lothian because it is creaking at the sides. I do not hold the board or the social care partnership responsible for that. GP surgeries are groaning under the weight of the new housing that has been forced on Edinburgh and are often closing their lists to new entrants. Added to that is the fact that our population is getting older.
John Mason—who I will let intervene in a minute, because I know that he wanted to—asked Alison Johnstone whether we need to divest from hospitals to invest in healthcare in the community. I would start by not wasting £1.4 million a month on a hospital that is currently lying empty and waiting for children.