Meeting of the Parliament 17 January 2024
I am very grateful to Jackie Baillie for bringing the motion to Parliament. Before I begin my remarks, I congratulate her on her investiture as a dame at the palace of Holyroodhouse this afternoon—her getting an honour for politics got up all the right people’s noses, I think.
Here we are again. The facts that are laid out in the motion for debate make grim reading. However, they are no surprise to any of us in the chamber, and we often see related matters in our casework postbags. Almost one in six people in Scotland are currently on NHS waiting lists for either tests or treatment, and 80,000 people are currently waiting over a year—365 days—to be seen. People are dying because they are waiting too long for emergency care. Just yesterday, A and E waiting times figures were released, and they are equal to the record-breaking figures of last year.
Things just are not getting any better. Whether people are being forced to wait hours for an ambulance or to be seen in A and E, or are being left abandoned on trolleys or languishing on wards, they are being let down. These problems are manifesting not just on the front line but across our health service in its entirety.
Let us take diabetes as an example. Currently, only 18 per cent of people who are living with diabetes in Scotland receive the essential regular health checks that they need. That is down from 40 per cent pre-pandemic, which was still well behind where it should have been.
I have lost count of the number of times that we have had debates like this in the chamber, and we keep having them—usually just in Opposition time. I fear that we have become inured to that. We have got used to our health service languishing and struggling in the way that it has, and we have become dangerously comfortable with crisis. Every time that we raise it in this place, ministers refer to the pandemic. Every time that they do so, they insult the intelligence of all of us here and the people who are watching us, and they seriously test the patience of the hard-working staff on whom we rely. The issues in our NHS were there long before anyone had heard of Covid-19, and people are tired of those excuses. They are tired of the ministerial lack of interest and mismanagement that have defined the SNP-Green Administration’s approach to health.
I want it to be crystal clear that none of that is the fault of our hard-working staff. They have worked their fingers to the bone. They have worked miracles and spun gold out of straw. They work long hours under the most stressful circumstances imaginable and deserve our utmost thanks, but they are being let down as well. There are currently almost 6,800 NHS workforce vacancies unfilled. That puts enormous, untold strain on the staff who are there. The chair of BMA Scotland has said that doctors and other healthcare workers are exhausted and facing burnout under those increasing workloads.
SNP-Green Government decisions have compounded the pressures on nursing staff, and that problem stretches all the way back to Nicola Sturgeon cutting nursing and midwifery training places and claiming at the time that it was the sensible thing to do.
The health secretary has shown zero sign of the innovative thinking that is necessary to resolve the issue. When Humza Yousaf was in his previous position, he repeatedly ignored my party’s call for a plan to address staff burnout and to set up a health and social care staff assembly. The Government has shown a pig-headed contempt for a strategy that would guarantee annual leave, ensure safe staffing levels and champion the expertise of those who know our health service best.
It is little wonder, then, that we are now finding it harder than ever to attract and retain new staff. On this Government’s watch, costs for temporary staff have risen to more than £0.5 billion in recent years. Instead of making the meaningful investment that our health service needs, the Government is relying on short-term fixes to plug the gaps.
To put it plainly, the Government is failing. It is failing Scotland’s NHS—both the hard-working staff who run it and the patients who depend on it. Staff and patients alike need long-term solutions. They need new hope.
The health secretary needs to do three things—I will close with these. He needs to urgently redraft his failing recovery plan, give hard-working staff the fair pay and conditions that they deserve, and fix the issues in social care so that people can be treated in the community, rather than being left to languish on hospital wards when they are well enough to go home but too frail to do so without a viable care package.