Hansard

No.

Those delays have the most serious of consequences. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine tells us that delays in accident and emergency lead to worse outcomes and, ultimately, cost lives.

The NHS stands on the brink of a humanitarian crisis. The hard-working staff are doing their very best, but they are exhausted. They get angry when the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care does not hear what they are saying, and they are in despair at the lack of support for them and for their patients.

Maybe the health secretary will listen to the British Medical Association, which has said that the system

“just doesn’t work properly anymore—staffed by people on their knees and genuinely at the brink of what they can cope with”

and that

“some honesty from our politicians on the scale of the challenge will help with this—and then finally we may start to address the need to make sure our NHS is sustainable for the future.”

However, the complacency in the Scottish National Party amendment suggests that the health secretary’s fingers are well and truly in his ears.

What about the Royal College of Emergency Medicine? It has said that many of the components of the SNP’s winter resilience plan

“will not be in place to prevent further harm to patients and staff this winter.”

How about the view from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh? It tells us that the solution lies in properly funding social care in order to tackle delayed discharge and therefore free up hospital beds. Again, the health secretary is deaf to the solutions, because he knows better than the health experts.

His winter resilience plan has no new resources. That is right—not a single penny extra. All of the money has been pre-announced, some of it more than 11 months ago. We know that social care has been underfunded for more than a decade, and the health secretary’s repackaged, reheated and recycled funding announcement is a pathetic excuse for urgent action. In fact, he is currently raiding the budgets of general practitioners and health and social care partnerships at a time when they need the money the most.

But it gets worse. The Convention of Scottish Local Authorities tells me that, despite its asking, the health secretary has provided no detailed plan about what needs to be done in social care to help with the impending winter crisis. There has been not one single iota of detail—and winter is here.

I have been in Parliament for 23 years and I can say, without fear of contradiction, that Humza Yousaf is absolutely the worst health secretary since devolution.

Let us prove that—let us look at his predecessors. Under Nicola Sturgeon, in October 2011, 95.9 per cent of people were seen within four hours at accident and emergency. Under Alex Neil, the figure in October 2013 was 93.9 per cent. [Interruption.]

No, no—I am praising SNP ministers, so SNP members may want to listen. Under Shona Robison, the figure in October 2015 was 91 per cent. Under Jeane Freeman, the figure in October 2020 was 89.6 per cent—let me remind members that that was eight months into the same pandemic on which the current health secretary blames all his failings. Our missing-in-action health secretary presides over the record low of 64 per cent.

Waits of more than eight hours and 12 hours at A and E are at record highs. Literally thousands of patients—more than 3,000—have waited more than eight hours and 1,300 have waited more than 12 hours in the past week alone. That means that as many as 37 people could have lost their lives this week because of delays.

Patients wait on trolleys, get intravenous drugs administered in corridors, which is not safe, and sleep in chairs overnight. That is the new normal in accident and emergency. When Jeane Freeman was in charge back in October 2020, no more than 350 people—a fraction of the current figure—in any week during the month waited more than eight hours to be seen. That is the difference.

Finally, I turn to doctors, nurses and other NHS workers who are the backbone of our NHS. The health secretary is fond of telling us that the NHS has record levels of staff, but he fails to tell us that they are coping with record levels of demand and are doing so with record levels of vacancies—there are almost 7,000 nursing vacancies alone. There is a critical shortage of GPs and other allied professionals. Patient safety is being compromised on a regular basis, and there have been successive years of failure to workforce plan.

The latest pay offer helps the lowest paid the most, but for many skilled and experienced nurses the pay offer is less than the 5 per cent that was previously promised. Nurses’ pay has declined by 17 per cent in real terms, and inflation is now at 10 per cent. That is not a fair pay deal, and nurses in Scotland are now being balloted on strike action.

Our NHS is on its knees. The health secretary has a choice, but doing nothing is not a choice. He needs to stop people needlessly dying this winter. His choice is to set out a clear plan to end waiting times of more than eight hours, because this is about saving lives, and if he cannot do that, frankly, he must resign.

I move,

That the Parliament is deeply concerned that record numbers of patients are waiting over eight and 12 hours in A&E on a weekly basis; acknowledges that hospital capacity continues to be constrained by thousands of bed days lost due to delayed discharge; recognises the tireless work of the NHS staff who care for patients in increasingly difficult and safety critical situations; notes that the Scottish Ministers have not yet resolved the nurses’ and NHS staff pay claim risking industrial action during the winter period; considers the Scottish Government’s NHS Recovery Plan and Winter Plan to be inadequate with the new interim targets to reduce waiting times being missed and no additional funding for the impending winter crisis, and calls for the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care to either set out a clear plan to end waiting times of more than eight hours ahead of winter, or to resign.