Part of First Minister’s Question Time – in the Scottish Parliament at on 10 October 2024.
The national health service is working to reduce waiting times for individuals. The latest information that is available to us on NHS in-patient and day-case activity, which is for quarter 2, tells us that that is now at the highest level since the start of the pandemic.
The problems that Mr Sarwar puts to me are an accumulation of the impact of delays to treatment because of the pandemic. On waiting times, the figures that I just put on the record show the 10th quarterly increase in a row and are 9.9 per cent higher than they were during the same period last year. That comes on top of the fact that, over the past 12 months, there has been a 5.1 per cent increase in the number of operations performed, which addresses part of the issue that Mr Sarwar put to me, principally with regard to orthopaedic treatment and others.
We are seeing an improvement in national health service capability and in its capacity to impact on the waits that Mr Sarwar put to me, but we have significant challenges to overcome as a consequence of the pandemic. The Government is focusing resources through the investments that we are making. In this financial year, we have allocated more than £19.5 billion—a record amount of funding—to the national health service to ensure that the resources are in place to address the challenges that Mr Sarwar put to me.