Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 22 September 2021
I thank the Labour Party for choosing to devote some of its parliamentary time to this issue. The Labour Party is correct to say that the Government has failed, because it has. It has failed Gerard Brown, Catherine White, Lilian Briggs and many others who have been forced to wait hours for help while in agonising pain, often being unable to access food and water or even to go to the toilet. For those who are not as directly involved in politics as we in the chamber are, the stories that broke last week in the Daily Record will have come as a great shock. Sadly, however, the crisis has been on the cards for a long time.
In the summer of 2016, a Scottish Liberal Democrat freedom of information request revealed figures that showed how much pressure the Ambulance Service was under. In 2015-16, the Scottish Government’s target to respond to serious incidents in less than eight minutes was missed more than 51,000 times. In Glasgow, the number of patients who faced waits of 20 minutes or more almost trebled from 80 to 233. In Aberdeen, the number rose from 16 to 40. The warning lights have been on for years, but the Government still has the audacity to blame the pandemic, in large part, for its own failures.
Two weeks ago, after I lodged an urgent question on A and E waiting times, the health secretary told me that I needed to ground myself in reality, so let me take the opportunity to lay out for him what the reality looks like. The reality is that one in 20 patients who are in pain is waiting more than a year for treatment; that nearly 8,000 patients are waiting more than four hours to be seen in our A and E departments; that 8,356 ambulance staff working days were lost due to mental ill health in 2020 alone; and that Gerard Brown lost his life because he waited 40 hours for an ambulance. While the health secretary dances around scrutiny, berating anyone who dares to hold him and his Government to account, people are hurting and people are dying.
Granular improvements are not good enough. The delays are not the result of the pandemic alone, and they are certainly not the fault of members of the public who call in desperation for emergency care. They are a symptom of an overrun and understaffed healthcare service that has been ignored for too long by a Government whose priorities have been elsewhere.
If resources are not offered soon, staff will leave and the NHS will be in even more trouble. Last year, my colleague Liam McArthur led the campaign to pay student paramedics. In October 2020, the former Minister for Public Health, Sport and Wellbeing, Joe FitzPatrick, said that he agreed with the principle but could not agree to a bursary—that is, until the election campaign, when the polls indicated that the SNP had to do something. It is too little, too late.
The ambulance waiting times crisis did not come out of nowhere. It is the result of failure after failure at the hands of the Government. The unimaginable pressure that our health service is under is scarring a generation of healthcare professionals. Staff are struggling and are fighting against impossible workloads.
The health secretary failed to provide any light at the end of the tunnel with his NHS recovery plan. It was a bundle of repackaged announcements, most of which will not take effect until years down the line. Nothing in his statement yesterday reassured the public or Parliament that things will get better. Staff, patients and their families not only deserve more from the Government; their health actively depends on it.
I reiterate my call to the Government. If the health secretary is content and confident that the problem is purely an aberration that has been caused by the pandemic, let him conduct a review into waiting times and into why deaths, such as that of Gerard Brown, happened. If the cabinet secretary is confident about the statistics and results, let him publish them for Parliament and the public, who are watching the ambulance waiting times crisis.
We are happy to support the Labour Party motion.
16:55