Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2026 [Draft]
I declare an interest as a practising NHS GP.
It is great to see the cabinet secretary back in the chamber, but he is wrong, because, during this parliamentary session, we have seen three different health secretaries, record waiting lists, record drug deaths, problems with delayed discharge and a failure to modernise our NHS. After almost 19 years in government, this is a mess of the Scottish National Party’s own making.
I came into politics because I wanted to stand up for patients, stand up for ourselves as doctors, nurses and key workers, and strengthen our greatest asset—our NHS. Under the SNP Government, our NHS has been recklessly mismanaged, leading to countless scandals that have caused unimaginable suffering among patients and fear among staff, and patients have sat on two-year waiting lists.
With that evidence in mind, how does the Scottish Government think that Scots would assess its performance on health and social care in this parliamentary session? Members of the public who are stuck on waiting lists would give it a score of zero.