Meeting of the Parliament 10 June 2015
Like other members, I value our hard-working and dedicated doctors, nurses, lab staff, porters and other NHS staff. I also value their stand-up-and-be-counted attitude. It is often those health workers who highlight NHS problems, including the 434 who complained in the course of one year about staff shortages in NHS Lanarkshire.
To attack MSPs who take up such issues is to show contempt for the workers who have raised them. Likewise, we should not undermine the public when they express concerns; people know and understand that it is not the front-line workers who are responsible, but those who are in charge of the NHS. Let us therefore stop the diversionary tactics, admit that the NHS has problems and address them.
When I tried to do that, I was accused of scaremongering by NHS Lanarkshire even though I was using its own words, taken from its own documents. It is as though NHS Lanarkshire does not want the public to know what we are talking about. It is okay for Lanarkshire NHS Board to talk behind closed doors about the fragility of services such as A and E and its plans to close departments because of staff shortages, but woe betide anyone else who talks about those things. It is okay for the board to see shortages highlighted in red and amber, but it is not for us to repeat that those are high-risk areas or to question why locums are being flown in from all over the world.
The board should be a scrutiny body, not a defence mechanism, but when I raise staff and public concerns and the chief executive accuses me of scaremongering, the board says nothing. That does not encourage the public or, indeed, others to speak out. The board members are public appointments who are supposed to represent the public; instead, they dismiss legitimate concerns, rubber-stamp proposals despite public opposition and are rarely heard speaking up except to defend crucial matters such as the chief executive’s pay.
However, it is not all about money. The cabinet secretary is well aware of the many problems that have beset NHS Lanarkshire over the past year or so. An independent report backed whistleblowers who raised the alarm over a lack of suitably trained workers in neonatal services. The NHS claimed that the matter was being sorted, but other areas were left depleted. We also see the impact of staffing shortages in the fact that NHS Lanarkshire sometimes has more patients waiting for over 12 hours than the rest of Scotland combined.
The rapid review of NHS Lanarkshire highlighted the problems of Lanarkshire’s A and E services. Audit Scotland highlighted NHS Lanarkshire’s repeated failure to meet out-patient waiting times and delayed discharge targets. Leaked documents highlighted service configuration problems in Lanarkshire, and mental health services are still dealing with problems following the controversial reconfiguration that was implemented when Alex Neil was the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing. A and E services are still under pressure, and the situation will worsen with the disintegration of GP out-of-hours services, which the NHS says
“have reached the point where it is becoming extremely difficult to provide a safe service.”
As the cabinet secretary is aware, GP out-of-hours services is a big issue in Lanarkshire, not least because, until July last year, there were five centres, but that figure has now been cut to three. The centres are co-located within A and E departments; according to the five royal colleges, that is the best option, where available. I am pleased that the cabinet secretary described co-location as
“in line with the work we are already doing.”
There is a good chance that the review will recommend that.
The cabinet secretary asked the board not to make permanent changes until the national review reports, but that call appears to have been ignored, with the board rebranding the permanent change as an interim measure.