Meeting of the Parliament 16 January 2025
I thank Tim Eagle for this important debate. Like my colleagues, I also thank our exceptional healthcare workers. My daughter was recently taken into Aberdeen royal infirmary, so I know that staff are working extremely hard and doing a fantastic job under pressure.
I take this opportunity to raise some of the concerns about our declining health services that I hear of every single day as the constituency MSP for Aberdeenshire West. Our local services are at risk of collapse and our GPs are crying out for help. The cabinet secretary will be aware that I have long campaigned to keep our community hospitals open, particularly Insch war memorial hospital, which was closed at the start of Covid and remains so, despite broken promises made by two First Ministers.
Elsewhere, closures such as that of the Scolty ward dementia unit at Glen O’Dee in Banchory see services removed. The minor injuries unit in Huntly has had its overnight provision slashed, which causes a serious worry that GMED services will also soon face cuts. Those local units would relieve pressure on ambulances and the ARI, but the health board simply does not have the funds to keep them open. As has been mentioned, NHS Grampian was escalated to stage 3 of the finance framework today, which will no doubt lead to further cuts and closures.
Like others, we have also seen a reduction in services being provided locally. The SNP Government’s one-size-fits-all approach simply does not recognise the reality of our rural communities, and that has very real consequences in people’s lives. Centralisation has resulted in elderly constituents being forced to make lengthy journeys, often in areas without public transport, for something as routine as a flu jab. Some residents in Alford were even told that they should organise taxis with other patients, which is a ridiculous suggestion, considering that they would not know other patients’ appointment times due to the general data protection regulation.
As others have touched on, ambulance provision affects my whole constituency. In October, a baby was delivered under traumatic circumstances, and the family had to do CPR for half an hour on a newborn baby before an ambulance arrived.
Although I am grateful that the health secretary has agreed to meet me, I have little confidence that the SNP will implement any meaningful change after mismanaging our NHS for 18 years. Where communities find solutions—such as covering the capital cost of a new 4x4 first responder vehicle in Braemar—the Scottish Ambulance Service rejects them, saying that it will not cover the maintenance costs. I look forward to the cabinet secretary’s response to that when we meet; it is a decade after the Braemar ambulance was stripped from the community.
For rural communities, the decline of healthcare provision is now literally a matter of life and death.
17:43