John Ferry John Ferry

The SNP’s NHS meltdown

When he’s not falling off his scooter like he’s auditioning for the role of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther franchise, the gaffe-prone Scottish health minister, Humza Yousaf, is mired in a multitude of Scottish NHS crises.

This month saw Britain’s armed forces parachuted in to prop up the Scottish Ambulance Service. Nicola Sturgeon was forced to call on the military after distressed patients had to wait hours, and sometimes even days, for an ambulance – one of the most harrowing cases involved a frail Glasgow pensioner who died after waiting 40 hours for an ambulance to arrive.

Dig into the government statistics and the scale of the crisis facing the Scottish NHS is clear. At the end of June over 115,000 Scottish patients were waiting to be seen for the government’s eight ‘key’ diagnostics tests (such as CT scans, MRI scans and endoscopies) an increase of 9 per cent from the end of March, and 17 per cent higher than at the end of June 2020. The key diagnostics waiting list is 30 per cent higher than the 12-month average prior to the onset of the pandemic.

The latest emergency department performance figures meanwhile show four-hour performance reaching its lowest level since records began, with the number of patients delayed in accident and emergency continuing to rise steeply. Almost 30 per cent of people attending A&E in the week to September 12 had to wait more than four hours.

The scale of the crisis facing the Scottish NHS is clear

Commenting on the deteriorating situation earlier this month, Dr John Thomson, vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Scotland, said: ‘Among staff there is serious concern and low morale, winter is fast approaching and quite simply there is low confidence that our hospitals and staff are going to be able to cope.’

He added that ‘the entire health service is under severe strain’, and that ‘resourcing has not met demand for some time.

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