Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 November 2021
As has been said throughout the debate, although the chronic shortages of staff in our NHS have been exacerbated by the pandemic, they were not caused by it. The crisis is 14 years in the making.
As my colleague Jackie Baillie forensically set out, the Government has presided over historic failures in workforce planning. It was warned time and again. Further to that, for far too long, there has been underinvestment in higher education, which trains our NHS staff of the future.
The funding that is awarded for Scottish students comes nowhere near meeting the cost of training them. We welcome today’s call for a significant increase in funded places for front-line medical staff, but there is a worrying lack of understanding from the Tories on the practical constraints on that. Jackie Baillie set out that there were 9,530 applicants last year and 1,290 students were admitted, and she asked a reasonable question about where the bar would be set.
The Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care and Paul McLennan fell into some of the same patterns by hailing the number of people admitted who met the entry requirements while seemingly unaware that those entry requirements are, in significant part, set to limit entrants based on the number of funded places that the Government supplies.
I welcome the broad agreement among members of all parties who have spoken about the fact that much more can be done to recruit young and older Scots. It would be good to hear more about how that can develop, so that we can increase the number of Scotland-domiciled people who are involved in our NHS. However, we currently have acute shortages in a range of areas. Those are in not only—to name but a few—vascular surgery, neurology, internal medicine and mental health, which Alex Cole-Hamilton highlighted, but nurses and, crucially, GPs.
Therefore, when the health secretary made a trip to my Lochee ward to glumly announce a national scheme for new GP surgery buildings—