Meeting of the Parliament 03 March 2026 [Draft]
It was staff in the Royal College of Emergency Medicine who asked me to bring the motion to the Parliament. It is patients who tell stories about delays in ambulances. I am bringing their voice to the chamber, and I hope that the cabinet secretary pays attention.
Jean’s story would be shocking if it was a one-off, but it is not. In January, the number of people waiting for more than eight hours and 12 hours at A and E was at its highest point on record. In fact, for waits of over 12 hours, this is the first time on record that the figure has exceeded 10,000.
At the Royal Alexandra hospital, which is used by patients in my constituency, the number of people waiting more than 12 hours rose from 66 in December to 314 in January. The proportion of patients who were seen within four hours declined from 70 per cent to 62 per cent over the same period. Things are actually getting worse, not better. As Dr Fiona Hunter, the vice president for Scotland of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, put it:
“This grim milestone should be cause for profound concern among our health service and government leaders. But more importantly, behind this headline figure are individuals who have been let down at their time of greatest need, by a crumbling system that has been neglected, despite repeated cries for help.”
It is time that the SNP stopped producing press releases claiming that everything is wonderful and started listening to patients and staff about how to ensure that hospitals are once again run in their interests. I have talked about waiting times, but using the metric of acute hospital bed occupancy can also help to free up A and E. To quote Dr Fiona Hunter again,
“The A&E crisis is not caused by floods of barely-sick people rocking up to our departments, but by a lack of beds in inpatient wards, which is itself driven in no small part by an under resourced social care system.”
In other words, it is not, at source, a hospital problem, but a social care problem.
I have spoken many times in the chamber about the current social care crisis, including the £560 million funding gap that is facing health and social care partnerships in the current financial year. At the latest count, there were 26 per cent more people waiting on a social care assessment for a package of care in comparison with the same time last year. In total, that is 10,810 people waiting for social care assessment in February alone.
We know that targeting delayed discharge can improve hospital flow, because the Royal infirmary of Edinburgh does that. Consultants worked with the local health and social care partnerships to fund care packages and help patients out of hospital. The number of patients who were seen within four hours increased by more than a quarter, and there were almost 8,000 fewer 12-hour waits. It is better for patients, and better for staff—what is not to like about that?
We must tackle the pressures on emergency departments now. I do not know any member of NHS staff who signs up to keep people waiting for longer than necessary in A and E, and we know that long waits lead to poorer outcomes. The Royal College of Nursing has highlighted issues with nursing recruitment: 2,800 NHS nursing vacancies are unfilled, and 1,000 fewer people applied to undergraduate nursing courses in 2025 in comparison with 2019. The reality is that NHS Scotland has at no point employed the number of nurses that it says that it needs.
The Scottish Government must act, therefore, to stop the crisis getting worse before it leads to more corridor care, more burn-out and even fewer nurses on hospital wards—[Interruption.] I do not think that I have time to take an intervention.