Meeting of the Parliament 19 November 2025
I thank the member for bringing this really important members’ business debate to the chamber. In some ways, I am a little bit shocked. I had a speech prepared, but I am not going to go through my speech—I will speak for a shorter time.
I am my party’s spokesperson on rural issues, but what shocks me is that we are all having exactly the same problems. I was going to speak about exactly the same things that Finlay Carson, Sharon Dowey and members of the Labour Party have spoken about. I was going to speak, for example, about the fact that we have ambulances queuing outside Dr Gray’s hospital and Aberdeen royal infirmary for hours on end, with patients stuck in the back, because they cannot get inside.
I was going to talk about the fact that I have one constituent currently on my books who presented to their GP in May with what turned out to be breast cancer, and they are only now starting treatment. That is a young woman with a young family who has waited months and months for treatment. In my eyes, that is not acceptable.
I was going to talk about the lack of beds. Grampian has the least acute bed space in the whole of Scotland, and yet nothing is being done to correct that. I was going to talk about delays to people being able to leave hospital because we have shut down community hospitals.