Meeting of the Parliament 03 March 2026 [Draft]
I will continue on just now, then—sorry, Mr Kerr.
We also need to be more innovative with new solutions that are out there to enable people to look after their own healthcare.
Those are all things that the Scottish Government is doing. Sometimes, in my view, people think mainly about A and E when they think about healthcare, because it is perhaps the only place, other than their GP surgery, that they access. The situations in which people attend A and E—I have had cause, in the past year or so, to be in A and E with a family member—can be quite frightening, and they can be busy and difficult places. There is a lot going on, and people may be seen in different places in an A and E department. They are difficult places, but there is a lot of good stuff going on in the national health service in Scotland in general that I think will bear fruit for A and E departments as well.
As the cabinet secretary said in his intervention, we cannot forget the absolutely fantastic staff who work in A and E under pressure. One of our good family friends has been the head of A and E at Wishaw general—another NHS Lanarkshire resource—and I have had many discussions with her over the years. She tells me often what a demanding, difficult and high-level job it is, but she does not often recognise the negative political discourse that she hears in the Parliament. The lesson of that for us is that we all have to come together—both the governing party, whoever that is, and the Opposition parties—and work together to find solutions to what is a very difficult issue that is affecting A and E departments everywhere in the UK, not just in Scotland. We need to make our A and E departments better, and we need to do so by working together.