Meeting of the Parliament 11 June 2025
I am pleased to speak in the debate, although I am tired of saying that there is an NHS workforce crisis, as we do so repeatedly. It is a crisis, and that fact is self-evident to those who work in our NHS and those who rely on it. The crisis is plain to see in waiting times and hospital pressures and in the workforce that our system depends on.
Let us be absolutely clear at the outset that the crisis is caused by years of complacency by the SNP Government, which has now been in power for almost two decades. One in six Scots is on a waiting list. People are forced to go private for healthcare, not as a choice but in desperation, and patients are waiting weeks just to get an appointment to see their GP. I am sure that I am not alone among members in this, but not a week goes by when I do not get a constituent visiting me or getting in touch to tell me the impact that the situation is having on them or someone they love.
I turn to the workforce. We have more than 2,500 unfilled nursing and midwifery vacancies, but newly qualified nurses are still struggling to find work. How can that be? How can it be that, in this chamber, we passed legislation to ensure that our nurses should never go to a shift that is not safely staffed, yet none of them reports confidence in the safety of the shifts that they are asked to staff? We have resident doctors who are unable to get on to specialty training programmes despite investing years of study and service in our NHS. That is not just a tragic waste of talent; it is an insult to those who are waiting for placements, but also to the staff and patients who desperately need their expertise on the front lines.
What is the point in increasing training places without ensuring that jobs exist at the other end? There is no proper bridge between training and practice, and the few bridges that exist are now bottlenecked, leaving exhausted senior clinicians to oversee more trainees with yet fewer resources. I have spoken with experienced locum doctors in my constituency who have told me that they cannot find work in Edinburgh—our capital city—where demand for healthcare, including primary care, has never been higher. That is how broken the system is. Patients are crying out for care, yet qualified clinicians are left on the sidelines because GP practice budgets are so stretched that they cannot reach for the luxury of sickness cover.
That is not just mismanagement; it is a direct result of a Government that has failed to take responsibility for national workforce planning. The Government has pushed responsibility on to local boards without the long-term modelling tools that are needed to deliver. It is clear that the Government’s future medical workforce project is not working. There are issues with the Government’s 2018 contract that expected GPs to work on a multidisciplinary model, and the demand for GP appointments has gone up significantly since then.