Hansard

I am grateful to the Labour Party and Jackie Baillie for making time in the chamber for this important debate. As I am sure is the case for all members in the chamber, hardly a day goes by when I do not receive an email, phone call or visit to the constituency office from someone who has been waiting for months, often in pain, for a routine operation or procedure, weeks for an important diagnosis or days just to speak to someone on the phone at their GP surgery.

That is part of our day job, but it is also part of our daily and personal life. Before Christmas, my father had a significant health event in October. He went for scans, but it was three weeks before those were properly looked at, because no consultants were available to process his readings. He is in mortal danger and is still waiting for a procedure that will make him well.

I have lost count of how many such debates we have had over the past few years, yet the frighteningly long waiting lists just are not getting shorter, and patient experience is not getting better. Our NHS is on its knees—it is in dire straits—and we simply cannot continue merely to talk about how bad things have become; we need meaningful action to make things better, both for the patients who rely on our health service and for our hard-working doctors, nurses and support staff, who are on the front lines and who, on a daily basis, are in increasingly difficult circumstances. None of this is their fault. In fact, they have to bear the brunt of it daily, and many are at breaking point. They are the first point of contact for frustration and for the patients who cannot be seen. That is laid bare by the large increase in absence due to mental ill health and staff burn-out.

At the heart of the debate are the on-going workforce issues, which have been well rehearsed already this afternoon, and in particular the SNP Government’s failure to properly plan ahead through workforce planning. Members do not need to take my word for it. In response to the First Minister’s speech on NHS recovery this week, the chair of BMA Scotland said:

“there is now an urgent need for a plan to deliver the kind of reforms that are required to make the Scottish NHS sustainable for generations to come.”

He went on:

“we still lack the detail and comprehensive vision needed to make any plan a reality.”

We still lack the vision. The Government has been in power for nearly two decades, and it has no vision as to how to make things right.

A BMA survey that ran just before Christmas was utterly damning. Of the respondents to that survey, 70 per cent said that they believed that the health service

“is operating on ... crisis mode all year round”

and not just in the winter months; 84 per cent did not think that

“the NHS is staffed adequately to cope with”

winter pressures; and 86 per cent

“had no ... confidence in the Scottish Government to put the NHS on a sustainable”

long-term

“footing.”

The personal impact of that is huge—it is demonstrable. I know one person in Glasgow who worked as a midwife for 30 years and quit last year because of the utter mental and physical exhaustion and a chronic lack of safety on the ward as a result of inadequate staffing. That is happening again and again.

Last month, an investigation revealed that mothers and babies at the Simpson maternity unit in Edinburgh came to harm in part due to short staffing. In total, 17 safety concerns were flagged, and the toll that the situation has taken on staff has been evident in the form of a 200 per cent increase in absence rates due to sickness.

Across the NHS, we are seeing the same vicious cycle at play. We know from a survey that Unison Scotland conducted that stress and burn-out are also primary causes of sickness absence among social care staff. Again and again, survey respondents are saying that stress has been exacerbated by staff shortages and having to work long hours—it is the same story.

We have to start undoing the damage that has been caused by the Government’s mismanagement of our health service for the entirety of its tenure. Liberal Democrats believe that we need to make a serious about-turn if we are finally to alleviate this crisis—the state of permacrisis that we are warned about every week—and take steps in the right direction. We need to retain existing staff by making working for our NHS less of an ordeal. We want Government to get to grips with recruitment—something that successive health secretaries have singularly failed at, both in our NHS and in the social care sector, which underpins the NHS in our communities.

We can no longer rely on agency staff to fill the gaps and to put out the fires. I am pleased that the Government is finally listening to the Lib Dems, who have been opposing the ill-fated national care service from day 1, and is no longer attempting its ministerial takeover of our social care sector. That will save hundreds of millions of pounds—there is no question about that—and that money is desperately needed to make care the profession of choice on the front line once again.

Everyone is entitled to fast access to their GP and to a wider range of skilled local healthcare staff, which should increase access to mental health support and physiotherapy. That is why my party has fought for, and won, extra funding for both social care and local healthcare in the coming budget.

Supporting primary care is one of the routes out of the crisis—there is no question about that. The Government must also finally listen to Liberal Democrat calls for a staff assembly that puts the lived experience and expertise of front-line staff at the forefront of designing a solution and a pathway forward.

I finish with this. Although I am glad that, this week, the First Minister finally admitted to the crisis that is engulfing our health service, I make it clear that the real change that our NHS needs and that its hard-working staff and patients who are waiting in pain need—indeed, the real change that Scotland needs—is a change of Government.