Meeting of the Parliament 03 December 2025
I am grateful to Labour for making time to discuss this important issue. As we convene in the chamber this afternoon, any number of our constituents might be waiting for an ambulance, either in their home or, worse still, in the street; any number of our constituents might be in an ambulance waiting to get into an accident and emergency department or trying to leave an accident and emergency department to get into the wider hospital; and any number of our constituents might be receiving a dispiriting telephone call to say that the elective orthopaedic surgery that they were expecting to have tomorrow has now been cancelled. That is all for want of capacity in our hospitals.
The crisis in our health service is not caused by a deficiency in emergency care or in orthopaedic surgery; it is caused by the fact that, on any given night in Scotland, 2,000 of our fellow Scots are trapped in hospital, well enough to go home but too frail to do so without a care package for them to receive at home or a care bed in a local care home. That reality causes an interruption in flow throughout our whole health sector.
This week, it was revealed that that is not the case just in our hospitals.