Meeting of the Parliament 26 October 2022
I am grateful to my friend Jackie Baillie for securing time for this important debate in the chamber. It is a timely debate. I cannot remember a time when our NHS was in such a state or when our valiant doctors, nurses and healthcare professionals were under so much strain. Had the cabinet secretary taken my earlier intervention, I would have reminded him that this is not solely about the impact of the pandemic that we have just been through. In fact, former chief executive of NHS Scotland Paul Gray reminds us that this is a crisis that was years in the making; Covid just hastened its arrival. It is wrong for the cabinet secretary to say otherwise and it is offensive to the people who are bearing the cost of this Government’s negligence day in, day out.
As grateful as I am that we are having the debate, I cannot help but feel a depressing sense of déjà vu. It feels like groundhog day. Each time we have such debates, Opposition parties come to the chamber armed with the latest round of disastrous health and social care statistics and, each time, the Government responds with reference to the pandemic and vague promises to make things better; often, it just tries to blame things on everyone else. It is small wonder that the SNP and Green Government does not make time for such debates in its own parliamentary time.
It is impossible to overstate the crisis that is engulfing our health service. Everybody knows somebody who is on a waiting list or who is suffering, whether it is a partner who arrives home late after another brutal ward shift or an elderly parent who is forced to wait for hours on a hospital gurney or for weeks just to speak to their GP on the phone. The cabinet secretary’s NHS recovery plan and winter plan fall woefully short. The Government is already missing its interim waiting time targets. The plans contain nothing that will make a material difference ahead of the inevitable strain of winter—and the first frosts have not yet arrived.
The stakes are literally life and death. For more than a year, A and E waiting times have steadily risen, tragically resulting in hundreds of avoidable deaths this year alone, yet, last month, the SNP-Green Government voted down my party’s proposal to hold an inquiry into those avoidable emergency care deaths. That is reprehensible. The more apparent the cost of this Government’s incompetence becomes, the more it will try to detract attention from its failures and instead turn attention towards the mythical vagaries of Scottish independence, which I think is the root cause of ministerial disinterest here.
I remind the chamber that, during her keynote speech at the recent SNP conference, the First Minister mentioned the NHS just 11 times, in comparison with the 58 mentions she gave to breaking up the United Kingdom. She had nothing to say on social care, and do not get me started on long Covid. I associate myself with Dr Gulhane’s remarks. There are now more than 200,000 sufferers of that debilitating condition. It is perhaps the biggest mass disabling event since the first world war, and we are nowhere in dealing with it. We are spending twice as much on an independence referendum as we are on assisting those people. It is the same old story, and it does nothing to help beleaguered nurses and doctors, or the patients who are left abandoned in our A and E departments.
The impact of Government failure is felt right across health and social care. The devastating story that we heard from Jackie Baillie at the top of her remarks is a story told the country over: ambulances cannot get to people in time because they cannot discharge patients into emergency wards when they arrive because A and E is full to the rafters with patients who cannot be admitted into the wider hospital due to the lack of beds. On any given night, more than 1,000 people who are well enough to go home but too frail to do so without a social care package are languishing in Scottish hospitals. Even when the care packages are arranged, too often those in need are still being let down.
The blame does not lie with staff. For years, they have worked tirelessly and diligently under enormous physical and emotional strain, and their reward is unfair pay and unimaginable working conditions. Were the Liberal Democrats in government, we would support staff immediately with a burn-out prevention strategy and an NHS staff assembly to set national standards in order to get rid of the postcode lottery in social care.
This Government loves to talk about a far-off land where everything will be better, but it has neither the desire—