Meeting of the Parliament 03 March 2026 [Draft]
No—I am about to tell the cabinet secretary a story.
On a Sunday morning in December last year, Jean, an 85-year-old great-great-grandmother who has dementia, fell out of bed and broke her hip. Her family called for an ambulance at 11 am, but no ambulance had arrived by the afternoon. After multiple phone calls, an ambulance finally arrived at 4.30 am the next morning, 17 hours after the family first asked for help. Finally, an ambulance drove Jean to Wishaw hospital, only to join the back of a queue of ambulances, because there was no room in A and E. It was 3 pm before Jean was finally taken into A and E, 28 hours after her family first called for help.
Jean’s daughter Karyn told me:
“We were sitting in the ambulance outside Wishaw Hospital for seven hours, thinking there must be people in their houses sitting and waiting too.
You hear about the state of the NHS and you think that can’t be right, but it is.”
One thing that Karyn wanted to make clear was that the paramedics could not have been more helpful. In fact, she felt sorry for them, because they were unable to do their jobs—indeed, not just the paramedics, but the nurses, doctors and other emergency medicine staff, too. They deserve our thanks, because they go the extra mile, and none of this is their fault. People who enter those professions do so because they want to spend their lives helping others. Imagine the frustration of staff who know that, for all their training and compassion, they are fighting a losing battle, because of Scottish Government incompetence.
Jean’s MSP, Davy Russell, wrote to the Scottish Ambulance Service about her case, and this was the chief executive’s reply:
“I do not feel that this is an acceptable situation or one that I wish to see repeated, however I must acknowledge that the entire system has been under extreme pressure due to limited flow through our acute hospital due in no small part to the approximately 2000 delayed discharges in acute hospital beds.”
I remind members that the Scottish National Party pledged to end delayed discharge in March 2015, yet figures published today show that, in January 2026, 1,973 beds were lost to delayed discharge every day, making it the worst January on record.