National Health Service (Delays)

– in the Scottish Parliament at on 11 January 2018.

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Photo of Richard Leonard Richard Leonard Labour

2. This week, we heard apologies from the First Minister to the thousands of people who have experienced unacceptable delays in getting hospital treatment and who have waited hours in pain for ambulance crews to arrive. Apologies are welcome, but can the First Minister tell us and can she tell the people of Scotland what changes she will make to ensure that our national health service in Scotland will not be in the same position this time next year?

Photo of Nicola Sturgeon Nicola Sturgeon Scottish National Party

We will continue to take the action that ensures that our national health service is the best-performing health service in the United Kingdom. I have already outlined the unprecedented pressures that our national health service is facing. I have given the figures on flu for the first week in January. In that week, flu rates were four times what they were in the same week last year. When we are facing demands such as that, it is not possible to completely eliminate the pressure on services. No health service can do that completely. However, because of the plans that our health boards have put in place, supported by the £22 million of additional funding that has been provided by the Government, and enabled by the hard work of front-line NHS staff, the ambulance service’s average response time to emergency calls, despite the 40 per cent increase in demand, is eight minutes, and almost eight out of 10 patients are still dealt with within four hours.

Let me address the point of the four-hour target. We often—I am guilty of this myself, sometimes—talk about that as being a target to see patients. However, the target is not just to see patients within four hours; it is to see, assess, treat and discharge or admit or transfer patients within four hours. Even at the height of the winter pressures, almost eight out of 10 patients are dealt with within that target period. Unlike the situation south of the border, in Scotland we have not sanctioned, or had to sanction, a blanket deferral of planned operations.

Richard Leonard no doubt wants to say that all of what our NHS is facing now is entirely down to bad planning by the Scottish Government, but here is another view. It is a view that was expressed yesterday in the Welsh Assembly

The First Minister:

I mention Wales simply to ensure that we are consistent in how we approach these things.

Labour’s health secretary in Wales said that the “unprecedented” spikes in demand in recent weeks

“are not pressures that you could reasonably plan for”.—[

Official Record

,

National Assembly for Wales

, 10 January 2018; para 128.]

I disagree with that. We can plan for them and, because we have properly planned, although there are pressures on our health service we are the best-performing health service in the UK. Those who are delivering that service deserve our thanks.

Photo of Richard Leonard Richard Leonard Labour

Well, there we are. The British Medical Association has already said that it is fed up with the Government’s spin, and patients in Scotland are fed up with it, too.

Let me give members a real example from right here in Scotland over the past couple of weeks. Tom Wilson of Newtongrange, who is 80 years old, fell on new year’s day and lay bleeding for three and a quarter hours waiting for an ambulance. His son called 999 seven times, only to be told that an ambulance was coming not from the Royal infirmary of Edinburgh, which was just 14 minutes away, but from Kelso. Mr Wilson then spent 13 hours on a trolley in a corridor in accident and emergency before he was admitted to a general ward. An 80-year-old man with underlying health conditions waited for more than 16 hours for treatment. He was discharged after four days, despite a nurse having told him that he should be kept in hospital, but the bed was needed.

What does the First Minister say to Mr Wilson?

The First Minister:

What I say to Mr Wilson is very simple: I say sorry to him if that was his experience of the health service. I said earlier this week and the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport said in the chamber that we apologise unreservedly to any patient who has waited longer than they should for hospital treatment or who does not get the standard of treatment that they have a right to expect not just in winter but at any time of the year, and I do that again unequivocally today. The health secretary and I will be more than happy to look into the specifics of Mr Wilson’s case if Richard Leonard passes them to us.

I am not standing here saying—and we have not said at any stage—that some patients are not waiting longer during these winter times than we would want them to wait. That is down to the fact that we face unprecedented demand and increases in demand. I will not repeat the figures. The Welsh Labour health secretary made the point yesterday that there are “unprecedented” spikes in demand, and we cannot eliminate the impact of that on services. However, because of the winter plans and the resources that we have put in place, and principally because of the hard work of front-line NHS staff, we have a system that is coping admirably. I have given the accident and emergency statistics and the wider situation with planned operations. However, that does not take away from the fact that we apologise to anybody who does not get the standard of care that we would want them to get, and we regret that.

Photo of Richard Leonard Richard Leonard Labour

First Minister,

“I am sure you will say it’s got nothing to do with you or the SNP and blame Westminster. I’ve seen on the news your answer is ‘we are doing better than England.’ Is this a joke?”

[Interruption

.]

Photo of Richard Leonard Richard Leonard Labour

Those are not my words; they are the words of Mr Wilson’s son in a letter that was sent to the health secretary this week.

The First Minister has been found out by the people of Scotland. The doctors, nurses and ambulance crews and patients and their families want to know what she is going to do to fix the mess that she has created in our NHS.

The First Minister:

Nobody who listened to the answer that I gave to Richard Leonard’s question about Mr Wilson’s situation would have concluded that I did anything other than take responsibility for that on behalf of the Scottish Government.

It is interesting that anybody who listened to Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister’s question time yesterday when he was asked about the Welsh health service would have heard his answer that it was all the fault of Westminster cuts to the Welsh budget. Westminster’s cuts to the Scottish budget are never recognised by the Labour Party here, of course.

I take absolute responsibility for our health service, but that is why I can also point out that we have the best-performing health service in the UK. I know that the Opposition does not like the comparisons, but I make them not because my ambition is just to be a bit better than England or Wales. When Opposition politicians say, as Richard Leonard has just done, that the pressures on our health service are just down to Scottish National Party management, it is entirely legitimate to look at the parts of the UK in which Opposition parties are in power.

I am not saying that our health service is perfect—I would never have said that when I was health secretary, and I would not say that now—but we have a health service that is performing better than that in any part of the UK, and that is because of the record of investment, the record numbers of staff and the planning that our health boards are doing, particularly during this winter period. We will continue to support them to do that so that they can continue to deliver for patients.