Meeting of the Parliament 03 March 2026 [Draft]
My thanks go to Jackie Baillie for bringing this incredibly important debate to the chamber, and for recounting the experience of one of my constituents, Jean.
I fully expect that the Government will judge Jean’s experience to be “unacceptable” or “not what we want to see”—I do not think that it would disagree with that—but the sentiment is hollow when it is not followed by prompt remedial action. Perhaps that feeling of unacceptability will be wiped away by the notion that the issue is anecdotal or that it would not happen today. However, my office has been handling cases such as the one that Jackie Baillie highlighted for months and months. My constituents have been left in pain and panic, trying to get an ambulance to the same A and E departments that they share with the health secretary’s constituents.
The issue is not anecdotal—it is systemic. Time and again, I hear from constituents with a long list of praise for the health staff once they get there or when their family member has been seen. We simply must extend our appreciation to our emergency health staff who, day after day, go above and beyond the call of duty. It is only because of those countless extraordinary individuals that our emergency departments have lasted this long, and not one ounce of blame for the current mess should land at their feet.
Jean is not alone in having to wait 17 hours for an ambulance. I know that there are worse cases out there. She is also not alone in having to wait nine hours in the back of an ambulance outside A and E. I heard from a constituent who had three separate ambulance crews spend their whole shift waiting with them outside A and E.
In the past couple of weeks, I have heard about the inevitable escalation of the situation from another constituent who was suffering from the side effects of his diabetes. An ambulance was called for him, but it did not arrive for nine hours. By the time the paramedics arrived, he needed to be resuscitated. An ambulance had been dispatched after seven hours, but it had been diverted to someone in even more dire need.
It is inevitable that, without immediate and transformative change in our A and E departments, people will die. The health secretary must immediately look at the real situation on the ground, not his own press releases. He must heed Jackie Baillie’s warning and look at the statistics that bear out what we have seen in relation to issues such as acute hospital bed occupancy, so that we are working towards real improvement and real increases in the quality and pace of patient care.
The health secretary must also listen to the words of the chief executive of the Scottish Ambulance Service, who points to mismanagement and a lack of planning in our social care sector on the part of the Government working its way up the chain to our acute medicine settings, with potentially deadly results.