There might be a health crisis but at least the SNP aren’t short on rose-tinted spectacles. It was always going to be interesting to see how Humza Yousaf approached the health service in his new programme for government – given the massive decline in performance on his watch. But rather than adopt a solemn approach (or even, gasp, apologise for the health service failings), Yousaf struck a somewhat triumphant tone.
‘The National Health Service is already making progress in recovering from the pandemic,’ he declared. ‘We have the best-performing accident and emergency departments in the UK!’ He continued: ‘In the last year, the number of people waiting more than 18 months for treatment has almost halved’. It’s decreased by 40.6 per cent — but Mr S will let him off for that minor arithmetical error. What is less forgivable is Yousaf’s omission that the outpatient waiting list has increased overall, and more specifically for those patients waiting over one year (from 35,000 to over 37,000) while the numbers of those waiting over three years have almost doubled (from 121 to 220). Inpatient waiting lists don’t provide a better picture with waits of over three years almost tripling, from 560 to 1,587.
Is the First Minister perhaps struggling with his statistics? Mr S wonders whether Yousaf has forgotten the latest figures that show that, overall, 800,000 Scots are stuck on NHS waiting lists, or that a quarter of patients are still waiting longer than four hours before being seen in A&E. Bed-blocking meanwhile hit an all time high only months ago. Health secretary Michael Matheson claimed there was transparency on figures — the ones crammed into the back of a Public Health Scotland booklet that is and not, er, in Yousaf’s announcement. ‘We’re very open and transparent about it,’ he assured reporters on Wednesday morning. But of all the many figures Matheson is referring to, it appears the First Minister cherrypicked possibly the only positive statistic available on the health service to include in his speech yesterday. How very transparent…
Another example of the SNP’s warped view of transparency involves the disgraced neurosurgeon Sam Eljamel. The NHS Tayside doctor is thought to have botched hundreds of brain operations, leaving patients suffering from pain and disability. Although a shocking report released last year revealed multiple failings in the health board that should have protected vulnerable patients, the Scottish government has certainly dragged its heels. Even when a distressed patient begged Yousaf at his recent independence convention to launch a public inquiry, he politely walked her out of the room — and has so far done nothing much else. Patients took to staging a ‘gory protest’ outside the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday in a bid to get the government’s attention. While Mr S has heard whispers that Matheson may commit more fully in his parliamentary speech today, he yesterday refused to confirm the launch of a public inquiry. More of that fabled SNP transparency on display, then…
Let’s hope that Yousaf manages to remember that the NHS is in dire straits fairly sharpish — or else he’ll have to answer to thousands more patients protesting outside parliament…
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