Sturgeon is irresponsible to blame Scotland’s NHS crisis on patients

Nicola Sturgeon has blamed ‘unnecessary attendances’ at hospital for the mounting crisis within Scotland’s health service. In a speech defending Health Secretary Humza Yousaf this morning, she said ‘hospitals right now are currently almost completely full’. Turn to Facebook and her government is running a series of adverts where the government’s clinical director, Jason Leitch, advises patients to seek help online as well as more messaging saying the country is facing ‘unprecedented’ levels of flu and Covid. But is Scotland’s NHS really seeing more demand than ever before?

Statistics on hospital attendances suggest not. In the week to Christmas day, 22,892 Scots turned up at A&E departments. But in the same week before lockdown (ending 29 December 2019) there were over 25,000 attendances. In fact, as the below graph shows, since the pandemic began there have only been five weeks where emergency attendances have risen above the average for 2019.

But A&Es are performing worse than ever. Just this morning The Scotsman splashed with a warning from senior medics that Scottish emergency departments are ‘not safe’. Looking at the figures it’s easy to see why. Some 1,900 patients waited over 12 hours for treatment and nearly half of those turning up at Scottish emergency departments are not seen within the four-hour target time. 

So why is all this happening if demand on services is lower than before the pandemic? The government points to bed blocking, though the majority of hospital beds are occupied by people who need to be there. Many of the people Sturgeon and Yousaf describe as ‘unnecessary attendances’ will be sick people at their wits end. They may not be at death's door but if they can't get seen by their GP and have found the online and phone services as useless as many people seem to then can we blame them for turning up in A&E?  

It’s not staffing either. Government press officers were keen to point out last March that the health service workforce has increased every year for the last ten. There are more staff per head of the population than in England too, yet the two countries face near identical problems. 

Maybe then, the people arriving at Scottish hospitals are in worse nick than they were before Covid struck. Virus infections and lockdowns, which were longer and harsher in Scotland, have led to increased heart attacks and strokes. Cancer diagnoses fell off a cliff during lockdowns and at one stage Scotland had the highest rate of excess deaths in Britain. It seems likely all this is coming to a head. All the more strange then that the government would want to discourage use of the health service again.

Sturgeon’s words could prove dangerous. We know that any policy that discourages use of the service just stores up problems for the future, even if it provides short term relief. The SNP can’t just blame winter bugs either. BMA Scotland’s deputy chair was clear on this over the weekend saying: ‘This isn’t down to flu. This isn’t down to covid. It definitely isn’t the fault of any patients and “unnecessary” attendances.’ But yet again, the SNP seem intent on kicking the can further down the road.