Hansard

I, too, thank Jackie Baillie for securing this important debate.

It has become almost clichéd to acknowledge the impact that the pandemic has had on our public services and the country more widely, but nowhere are the impacts of Covid-19 more evident than in the toll that it has taken on our health and care system over the past few years. When the pandemic was at its most precarious and most of us were asked to stay at home to protect ourselves, our loved ones and the NHS, and no vaccines or recognised therapeutics had yet been developed, our nurses and healthcare workers were on the front line, risking their health and wellbeing to ensure that the many thousands of those who were hospitalised with Covid and, indeed, with other illnesses, were treated in the most challenging of circumstances.

I thank nurses at Forth Valley royal hospital for the support that my loved ones received over the pandemic. Without the nurses in the stroke ward, mum would not have been able to have those few phone calls with us, and without the phenomenal district nurses in Grangemouth, grandpa probably would have ended up in hospital far earlier than he did. Nursing staff allowed us to stay with mum for as long as we needed, making sure that we had what we needed. Our story is not unique; people’s experiences of those who went above and beyond—from school nurses to intensive care unit nurses—are repeated across the country.

Although it is only fair to recognise nurses for all the great work that they do, we must also recognise the circumstances in which nurses find themselves now. NHS workforce vacancy statistics that were published in March show the continued trend of rising vacancies, emphasising the need to refocus on retaining and recruiting staff.

NHS Lanarkshire alone is experiencing a high vacancy rate of 10 per cent of available posts. The Royal College of Nursing Scotland has also relayed that, according to its workforce survey, 61 per cent of nursing staff are thinking about leaving their current posts. Those numerical factors alone underline the need for support to ensure that those within the profession are supported to continue in their roles.

The NHS in Scotland continues to be under significant strain as we begin to emerge from the worst of the pandemic, and it is necessary to ensure that existing staff are retained and that recruitment is significantly stepped up to fill vacancies.

Workforce planning remains central to providing long-term, effective healthcare, and the Scottish Government must consider its approach in the light of those recent publications. After all the NHS has done for us over the past two years of the pandemic, it is vital that we build back a system in which nurses feel valued and in which their safety and wellbeing are a priority.

Although I am proud of some of the measures that my party has helped to deliver over the past few years, such as creating a legal duty on the Scottish Government to ensure that there are appropriate NHS staffing levels, I join the RCN’s calls on the Government to implement the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act 2019. I hope that the cabinet secretary might be able to lay out a timetable for that.

The Scottish Greens have also helped to ensure that all nurses have the legal right to funded continuous professional development. We still have great strides to make to ensure that nursing is a long-term occupation for those who enter the profession. Those are tangible steps towards progress.

It also merits mention that nursing is not a singular block of professionals—they are people who are split across various and specialised areas. Mental health needs across Scotland and the historical lack of recognition of them have become much more focused in the public eye as a result of the pandemic. Successive lockdowns, although necessary for public health, exacerbated existing mental health conditions, and continuity for those receiving treatment is essential. A recovery response to the growth and acknowledgement of mental health conditions caused by Covid-19 needs to take a holistic approach that addresses the wider social, systemic and structural inequalities of health and wider society, rather than placing the onus entirely on the individual.

In closing, I point out that international nurses day is about celebrating all that nurses do and thanking them for everything that they do. I thank nurses for all that they have done for my family—and, I am sure, for the families of countless others in this chamber—and for going above and beyond to deliver for constituents in my Central Scotland region. I thank them for all the enduring support that they provide.