Brexit blamed for staff shortage
FIRST Minister Nicola Sturgeon claims Brexit has had a major impact on the NHS – creating staff shortages that have sparked the ambulance crisis.
Sturgeon was questioned yesterday about the growing problem of ambulance response times and patients queuing on trollies in corridors.
But she claimed Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal – as well as the pressures of Covid – had made it difficult for the NHS.
She said: “I think the health service is under more pressure than it has been under probably in any of our lifetimes.
“I have not experienced the health service under the pressure that it is under but we are living in a global pandemic.”
She said websites were full of headlines about ambulance waits in all parts of the UK and added it was “a significant challenge for health services everywhere”.
She continued: “That’s why we need to take the hard choices like vaccine certification to try to keep Covid under control but it is also why we need to invest in our health service.”
But she claimed: “We are seeing across our economy right now, but also in our public services, increasing staffing shortages because of Brexit.”
Labour’s health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie called her Brexit blame “shameless” and said her remarks were a “desperate bid to try to dodge her responsibility for Scotland’s NHS crisis”.
She added: “The problem with workforce planning and the lack of it dates to her time as Health Secretary when she reduced the number of training places. She started the process of reducing numbers.”