Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 November 2021
Our NHS is under pressure like never before, and it is increasingly clear that the SNP has no positive ideas for how to turn things around. All that it offers the people of Scotland, and our hard-working NHS staff, is more excuses.
The SNP does not want to admit that removing the cap on funded places for key NHS roles is the right thing to do. The current crisis in the Scottish NHS is, in large part, down to the lack of GPs, doctors, nurses and paramedics—and the list goes on. The problem stems from Nicola Sturgeon’s decision a decade ago, when she was health secretary, to cut the number of funded training places at Scottish universities. When this Scottish Parliament first sat in 1999, more than 60 per cent of medical places were filled by Scotland-domiciled students. That figure has dropped by around 10 per cent as a result of the decisions that have been taken in this chamber.
We cannot continue with a policy that is holding back our NHS. After having 14 years in which to sort things out, the SNP has failed. We know that the applicants are still there and are still applying, that Scottish universities are filling their funding places and could fill more with suitably qualified young Scottish people, and that the widening access places could and would be maintained. It would, therefore, surely be worth giving that suggestion more than a cursory glance.
As Paul McLennan outlined, there is a wide and diverse range of new training places, which conflicts with the cabinet secretary’s statement about the threat of a lack of training places for graduates of our medical and nursing schools. Would it not be a more desirable problem to have too many graduates, rather than the workforce crisis that we currently face? Surely our universities are better placed to meet and plan for the longer-term workforce needs.
At the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee earlier this month, the vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine stated that the training scheme had nationally determined numbers and was six years out of date, and that one in five consultants was considering early retirement and one in two was seeking to reduce their hours. He went on to say that, right now, we have one A and E consultant for every 6,500 patients, when it should be one for every 4,000; we are 130 whole-time-equivalent emergency medicine consultants short; and GPs are already facing unprecedented demand. Andrew Buist from the BMA translated those figures to say that, right now, there are 250 whole-time-equivalent GP vacancies in Scotland.
We cannot keep on letting the problems get worse. The SNP’s incremental increases in funding for places simply do not meet the scale of the challenge that we face. I urge members on all sides of the chamber to ask themselves whether we are doing enough to protect and future proof our NHS.
We cannot keep on doing the same thing and hoping that the staffing shortages will sort themselves out. We need a bold new approach. Is the SNP Government ready to admit that it has got it wrong? For a nationalist Government, which claims to care about Scotland, to be overseeing a system in which we are turning away bright young Scots who want to be the nurses, doctors and paramedics of the future is nothing short of shameful. By keeping the funding cap in place, we are selling Scotland short. We have the talent—let us do something about it and support the motion from Dr Gulhane today.
17:19