Meeting of the Parliament 21 February 2024
I welcome Mr Eagle to his place and look forward to listening to his maiden speech. He will certainly have big shoes to fill replacing Mr Cameron as the representative for Highlands and Islands. I also thank the Liberal Democrats for lodging its Opposition day motion on primary care for debate and say that members on the Labour benches will be supporting it.
We have, over the course of the parliamentary session, considered the issue of long waiting times on many occasions—and rightly so. One in seven Scots is on an NHS waiting list. The reason why we keep coming back to the issue is that it is not going away; in fact, it is getting worse under the current Government.
If primary care had the support that it needed, we would be able to build capacity and give people the timely help that they need in their communities, reducing pressure on our acute hospitals. Unfortunately, primary care does not have that support. The Scottish Government is not on track to deliver on its commitment to recruiting an extra 800 GPs by 2027, and its earlier commitment to recruiting 1,000 new community mental health workers has been abandoned. Patients and primary care teams deserve better than constant broken promises by the Government, and Labour supports the call in the Liberal Democrat motion for the NHS recovery plan to be rewritten.
I welcome the references to mental health in the motion, and I am sure that members will agree that the issue is raised frequently with us by constituents. It is, unfortunately, clear why that is the case: as of September last year, 27 per cent of children and young people who were referred to child and adolescent mental health services were rejected, an average of 26 children a day. Some patients have been waiting in excess of 1,000 days to start psychological therapies, and NHS 24 mental health hub calls about psychotic symptoms increased by 101 per cent between 2021 and 2023. That is an extremely serious demonstration of unmet need.
We know that support for mild to moderate mental health issues in the community has a positive impact on outcomes for patients, as well as reducing the demand for onward care, but the Scottish Government has failed to deliver on mental health services. The Government’s previous commitment to funding mental health and wellbeing services in primary care, before pulling the funding entirely after the health and social care partnerships had spent almost a year planning for delivery, has been a catastrophic failure. As the motion states, the mental health budget has been frozen and then cut in-year for two years running. That kind of incoherence is unsustainable, and these are not the decisions of a Government that takes mental health seriously.
Labour is clear that primary care teams need to be supported and afforded the headroom to innovate and establish the services required to meet the needs of their practice population. My amendment, therefore, notes that members on the Labour benches have serious concerns about health professionals not being meaningfully involved in Scottish Government decisions on service delivery, patient safety and workforce planning. The fact is that there is no service delivery, no patient delivery and no workforce without our dedicated NHS staff. Those workers and our patients deserve better, which is why our amendment calls for a national clinical council that is on a statutory footing to empower clinical experts and to make a better reality for patients and professionals.
I move amendment S6M-12214.1, to insert at end:
“; is concerned that health professionals are not meaningfully involved when the Scottish Government is taking decisions on service delivery, patient safety and workforce planning, and calls for the establishment of a statutory national clinical council, which would empower clinical experts and improve services for patients.”
15:18Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.