Hansard

I say to people: do not get sick, do not need an ambulance and do not need accident and emergency services in Scottish National Party-run Scotland, because in each of those areas the Government is letting them down. National health service staff, including nurses, doctors, and paramedics, are all doing their very best, and they absolutely deserve our thanks. However, they need more than warm words—they need action, and the SNP is not listening to their real and genuine concerns.

For months, the cabinet secretary has done nothing. Ambulance delays were raised as an issue in the press in June, July and August. Where was the cabinet secretary all that time? He was posted missing, clearly hoping that the problems would go away by themselves. However, that is not new. Susan Donald from Aberdeenshire got in touch with me. Her father died on 1 January 2021, aged 81. He fell and broke his hip three days earlier. She called the general practitioner at 6 pm, then she called 111, and she was finally put through to the Ambulance Service call centre at 9 pm. Despite it being an emergency, the ambulance did not arrive until almost 1 am the following day—seven hours after he fell.

The problem is not recent; it was happening nine months ago. Ms Donald, quite rightly, raised issues about co-ordination and governance, but she wonders why performance data that is available to senior management in health boards, the Ambulance Service and the Scottish Government did not flag the problems months ago. Patients raised concerns, health professionals raised concerns, and Unite the union raised significant issues of concern, as did the GMB. A doctor described the service as “third world”. There were almost daily reports of problems. Where was the cabinet secretary? People had to die, and it had to be on the front pages of national newspapers, to shock the Government into action. That is shameful.

Ambulance delays are the worst on record, but the delays have an underlying cause. The problem is patient flow through A and E and admissions to hospital. If we want to fix problems with the Ambulance Service, we need to fix the blockage at A and E and create more beds.

A and E waiting times are also the worst on record. The A and E waiting time target of four hours has not been met since it was introduced, in 2012—nine years ago. In the country’s flagship hospital, the Queen Elizabeth—which is in the cabinet secretary’s constituency, I believe—only 44 per cent of people were treated within that four-hour target time. Ambulances are queued round the block and the Red Cross has had to provide humanitarian aid to the paramedics and their patients because they are waiting so long. Unite has suggested that there should be a turnaround time of 30 minutes for an ambulance to transfer a patient to A and E. We agree. The cabinet secretary really must consider that seriously.

It is not just Glasgow that has a problem. Edinburgh has a problem, too, with only 52 per cent of people being seen within four hours. It is so bad at the Royal infirmary of Edinburgh that a doctor there described the hospital to me as a “war zone”, with elderly patients having intimate examinations carried out on trolleys in corridors, without any privacy.

Delayed discharge is also up by almost 50 per cent, and, with a significant number of Covid patients in hospital, there are simply not enough beds. In addition, there is a growing crisis in social care, which means that care packages for people leaving hospital are just not available.

Virtually every health board has cancelled elective surgery, which means that hundreds more people have been added to the almost 100,000 patients who are waiting for operations. A consultant confirmed to me this morning that even cancer surgery has been cancelled at the Glasgow Royal infirmary. And all of that is before winter pressures have even started.

John Thomson of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said that the NHS needed another 1,000 beds to cope with the crisis. Jamie McNamee, the Unite convener at the Scottish Ambulance Service, agrees. He went on to say that, if things are to improve, the plans must include field hospitals and other temporary admission units. However, that aspect was entirely missing from the health secretary’s statement yesterday. I urge him to urgently consider the use of temporary wards and to please consider field hospitals. We need the extra capacity. We also need to ask staff who have recently retired from the service to come back to help out.

Dr Sue Robertson of the British Medical Association Scotland told the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee that, without any realistic plans to increase the workforce in the short term, we face a “perfect storm.” What urgent action is the Government taking to deal with the crisis in the short term?

I know that the Government wants to blame all the problems on the pandemic. I agree that the pandemic has been really challenging for the NHS and for social care, but that is, at best, a partial excuse. In this morning’s Daily Record, a paramedic said:

“I am fed up reading and hearing in the news that the pandemic is causing the problems with delays. It’s true that it’s a contributing factor but this has been a disaster in the making for years.”

He is absolutely right.

Since 2010, the SNP has cut 1,200 beds from the NHS—in fact, the Government started cutting beds in 2007, the moment that Nicola Sturgeon became health minister. From 2007 to 2010, the SNP failed to pass on the money for health that was given to it by the United Kingdom Government. That would have resulted in £1 billion more in spending today on the NHS. I remind members that Nicola Sturgeon was the health secretary for that entire period. Yes, it was Nicola Sturgeon, too, who cut the number of training places for nurses and doctors, despite being warned about the problems with staffing. This disaster has been in the making for the past 14 years.

The NHS in Scotland is entirely devolved—it is not the responsibility of Westminster—and it is run by the Scottish Government. There is no grievance to be manufactured; there is nowhere for the SNP to hide. This is a problem of its own making. It needs to listen to patients and staff, and it needs to sort out the issue now, before it gets worse over the winter.

I move,

That the Parliament thanks the Scottish Ambulance Service paramedics, technicians, call handlers and other frontline workers who are under significant stress as they cope with the current pressures on the health service; regrets the failure of the Scottish Government to address the underlying and systematic problems facing both the ambulance service and the wider health and social care service that predate the COVID-19 pandemic; welcomes the support of the British Army in helping alleviate the current pressures on NHS workers and patients; recommends that the Scottish Government adopt a 30-minute maximum turnaround time for ambulances from arrival at hospital, which will release paramedics to answer other calls, and protect staff welfare and wellbeing by reducing shift over-runs and guarding rest periods, and further calls on the Scottish Government to increase capacity in the health service ahead of winter by calling on recently retired staff to return temporarily and establishing temporary wards and field hospitals to ease the pressure on Accident and Emergency departments and manage the clinical backlog.