Hansard

I am pleased to speak in the debate on behalf of Scottish Liberal Democrats. I am grateful that the cabinet secretary offered to meet me. I know that, in advance of the debate, he also met other members to talk about building consensus, which I welcome. As I told him at our meeting, our NHS is still in crisis. He knows it; we know it; and the people working on the front line, whom Gillian Mackay rightly thanked, know it. Many members have spoken of it in the chamber on countless occasions. Under 17 years of SNP Government, the fundamentals of our health service have been steadily eroded. Those who work in the NHS, and those who rely on it, are suffering greatly as a result. We are asking far too much of our hard-working staff. They are all going above and beyond repeatedly, and have done so for years.

I must take issue with the cabinet secretary’s reference to the Health and Care (Staffing) (Scotland) Act 2019. Even tonight, across the NHS, in hospital wards and in every health board area in the country there will be shifts that are not staffed safely, where both clinicians and patients are unsafe. We have yet to live up to the full spirit and fundamentals of that act. Across the board, clinicians, nurses, patients and ancillary workers have all been let down.

Primary care is one example. Many Scots are old enough to remember a time when, if they needed their GP, they could book an appointment and be seen within a couple of days. That is almost a forgotten country. Now, routinely, people have to make dozens—or hundreds—of phone calls, just to speak to someone at their GP practice. Two weeks ago, I spoke to a woman in Caithness who had phoned her GP practice 200 times when the phone lines opened at 8.30, before finally being given an appointment in three weeks’ time.

That is happening not just in that part of Scotland—it is happening everywhere. I have even heard of people being told that they would have to wait two weeks to get an appointment for a baby. For a young parent, that is a terribly long time to wait.

Many times I have borrowed the words of Dr Andrew Buist, chair of the BMA’s Scottish GP committee, who said:

“We are often told GPs are the bedrock of the NHS—but ... the bedrock is crumbling, and it is patients”

who are suffering. Patients are suffering—hundreds of thousands of patients in Scotland are languishing on waiting lists for tests or for treatment. We have heard harrowing tales of people in pain, waiting for hours for an ambulance to arrive.

Just last month, at First Minister’s question time—as you will remember, Presiding Officer—I, along with Douglas Ross, raised the case of a woman who nearly died on the doorstep of Portree hospital, on Skye. All the doors were locked at the time that she was suffering from asphyxiation, and her boyfriend was throwing rocks at the windows to get in. That happened despite a report six years ago telling the SNP Government to keep that hospital open for 24/7 care.

What about the thousands of Scots, many of them children, who are suffering with mental ill health as part of the long shadow of lockdown? They are forced to join the longest queue for treatment in our national health service. The motion refers to

“the importance of continuing to invest in mental health ... services”.

I could almost laugh at that if it was not so desperate. In previous budget negotiations, my party secured £120 million extra for mental health, but the SNP has seen fit to cut, in real terms, spending on mental health by nearly £80 million. With our young people still struggling with the legacy of the lockdowns, any mental health practitioner in the country will tell you that the Government could not have picked a worse time to let that funding slip away.

Just today, mental health treatment targets were missed yet again. Scotland needs world-class mental health services, and the Scottish Liberal Democrats will fight to see them delivered. That is why we have set out plans to increase the amount of tax that is paid by social media giants and use that money to help to fund more mental health support in schools and to get more professionals closer to where people live.

That is based very much on the polluter pays principle. We know that the ecosystems that are created by social media are the environments in which people are suffering abuse and dealing with body image issues, and they are finding those environments increasingly difficult to escape. The people who create that ecosystem should pay.

The Government is out of ideas for patients and staff alike, so it is no wonder that it is finding it harder than ever to attract and retain new staff. We need experienced staff, now more than ever, if we are to bring down those waiting lists. However, rather than making the meaningful investment that our health service needs, the Government is relying on short-term fixes to plug the gaps, and is pursuing its plans for an unwanted ministerial takeover of social care. That is little more than a bureaucratic exercise, but it will cost billions of pounds and it will do nothing to address the fundamental issues in social care that are leading to delayed discharges in our hospitals and creating an interruption in flow throughout the NHS.

Scottish Liberal Democrats want staff to be fairly paid and fairly treated, with good working conditions. The Government can make progress by adopting our burnout prevention strategy and setting up an NHS staff assembly so that our doctors and nurses can put their voices and their expertise at the heart of the solution.

Patients need to know that they will be tested, diagnosed and treated in a timely fashion when they seek care from our health service, so as to have the best chance of recovery. That is all that they are asking for, and they are right to expect it. The competent management of our health service is perhaps the primary thing that we elect a Scottish Government to do—in fact, Neil Gray said as much in his closing remarks. The fact that some people have been forced to pay for private treatment to get well is emblematic of how bad things have become.

I am glad to see the Government making time in the chamber for a debate on health and social care. In truth, the subject has been given far too little time by the Government in recent months. I also welcome the sentiment that the health secretary expressed. However—and I hate to be pessimistic—we have heard it all before. Each of his many predecessors has promised much, but delivered little, and people are sick to the back teeth of being taken for granted. They need new hope and they need change. The health secretary, in his heart of hearts, must know that any new vision for health and social care in Scotland has to be one that does not involve his party.