NHS Scotland has been hit with more bad news as new figures reveal that 18,390 patients died last year while stuck on NHS waiting lists. The numbers come just days after Public Health Scotland found that the equivalent of one in seven Scots are languishing on NHS wait lists. The latest stats show that Scotland’s health crisis is far from under control and present First Minister, and former health secretary, Humza Yousaf with a rather sizeable headache.
Scotland’s central belt appears worst affected: Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s health board saw 3,276 patients on waiting lists die last year, while NHS Lothian (which includes Edinburgh) saw 5,995 and NHS Tayside (which includes Dundee) recorded 2,036 deaths.
The Scottish government has its work cut out if it is to prevent Scotland’s NHS imploding on Yousaf’s watch
There has been an upwards trend in waiting list deaths over the last five years, with a 39 per cent rise in deaths since before the pandemic in 2019. Pretty gloomily, Anas Sarwar, leader of the Scottish Labour party, predicts that ‘if this trend continues’ the waiting list death toll will break 20,000 this year.
The obvious correlation with growing wait lists cannot be ignored: during the period Yousaf was health secretary, from mid-2021 to March 2023, NHS waiting lists grew by 175,000. At the end of March this year, there were 779,533 patients waiting for appointments and procedures.
Health services in both Scotland and England have been under immense pressure following the outbreak of Covid-19, and it may be unfair to solely blame the Scottish government. Yousaf certainly feels this way, saying of the figures: ‘This is not because of the SNP government in Scotland, this is affecting health services across the UK. The reason why is the pandemic.’
However England does appear to be faring slightly better – when it comes to waiting times at least. It is estimated that the number of patients waiting for appointments and procedures for longer than two years in Scotland was 7,849 at the end of March 2023. Comparatively, it is thought that only 599 people faced waits of this length in England.
While waiting lists continue to expand, a growing number of patients are trudging unhappily away from their NHS. The data from four of Scotland’s health boards shows that there has been a 47 per cent increase in those patients leaving their lists to pay for their own healthcare – and yet waiting lists are still at record high levels. In NHS Ayrshire and Arran, a health board area covering the south-west of Scotland, those patients who left NHS lists to seek private care increased almost four-fold, by a staggering 359 per cent.
Calling out Yousaf’s ‘incompetence’, the Scottish Labour leader lambasted the Scottish government for creating a ‘two-tier’ health service, ‘where people are forced to either go into debt’ or face delays thanks to growing waiting lists. ‘Thousands of people are forced to leave the NHS and pay for their treatment – in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis,’ Sarwar has said. ‘Our NHS was built on the principle of healthcare at the point of need. That is clearly no longer the case for thousands of people in Scotland.’
While the First Minister has said that he doesn’t want anyone to feel like private healthcare ‘is their only choice’, Yousaf’s condemnation of Westminster is unlikely to fly with Scottish voters. After weeks of worrisome health updates, from staffing crises to failed treatment targets, the Scottish government has its work cut out if it is to prevent Scotland’s NHS imploding on Yousaf’s watch.
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