Covid-19

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 14 December 2021.

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The First Minister:

We will do everything that we possibly can to support those working in the health service. I cannot even begin to find the words to express my appreciation for that work, understanding the pressure that they are working under. There are many patients, including the individual cited by Monica Lennon, who are having disruption to their care.

We will do everything that we can to mitigate those impacts, but we come back, as we so often have during the pandemic, to the hard reality at the centre of this. The impact on services comes from the pandemic. As cases go up, we see a bigger impact in people being off work sick or having to isolate, with an inevitable impact on services. We need to come back, again—hopefully for the last time in the pandemic, although none of us knows exactly what is ahead of us—to the need to pull together to do all the right things to drive infections down. That will do more than anything else to allow us to get the NHS sustainably back on the path to normality.