Lives on the line as the NHS is on the road to ruin
STRANRAER, my home town in the deep SouthWest, was en fete for its inaugural oyster festival, but as the fun began late last Friday evening, an ambulance was pulling up outside a relative’s house.
A two-minute hop to the town’s Galloway Community Hospital? Eh, no.
The hospital’s facilities are modern, but services are limited because of staff recruitment problems – the lack of an anaesthetist is proving intractable.
So the patient was carted 75 snaking miles along the A75, with frequent stops in lay-bys for pain relief drugs, to Dumfries Infirmary.
Online there’s an Aberdonian SNP acolyte who says a crisis in the NHS is the figment of a newspaper headline writer’s imagination.
I’d love for him to have been aboard that ambulance inching to Dumfries and to see how he would handle subsequent 150-mile round-trips for visiting time.
So desperate is Wigtownshire’s situation that serious consideration was given to deploying Royal Army Medical Corps doctors to plug the gaps.
Dr Angus Cameron, medical director of Dumfries and Galloway NHS, later penned what was meant to be a reassuring letter.
‘The emergency department doctor can seek help from the Emergency Medical Retrieval Service based in Paisley: this service is manned by consultantlevel staff 24 hours a day and has a helicopter on standby able to rapidly transfer medical staff and transport seriously ill patients to Glasgow hospitals...’
You can imagine the scene as you lie with one foot in the grave. ‘The helicopter will be here once the cloud lifts. Meantime, I’m not an expert, but a consultant on the phone will talk me through a life-saving procedure I’ve never tried.
‘Anaesthetic? Sorry, no, but there should be a bottle of whisky here somewhere… Might have a nip myself to steady my hands!’
Wigtownshire is a microcosm for the ills of the NHS in Scotland, where record amounts of money are being shovelled in with little effect on outcomes. The NHS spent an unsustainable £1.5million on locums for Stranraer in the year up to April, yet ambulances must still make midnight runs along the A75.
Last time I wrote about Galloway Community Hospital, Health Secretary Shona Robison contacted the Mail to boast about ‘radically changing the way services are delivered’.
The lack of delivery in South-West Scotland is a disgrace and this is just one NHS crisis among many.
We learned this week that had the SNP kept pace with English spending over its decade in power, £1billion more would have gone to health. So much for the Nationalist ‘guardians of the NHS’.
Tory austerity? SNP parsimony, coupled with an inability to innovate and reform, is more damaging for patients.
In a top team so bereft of ability that Humza Yousaf is seen as a star, where Angela Constance lingers despite conspicuous lack of talent, where Fiona Hyslop and Keith Brown hide their failings, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s lack of options is painfully clear.
Meanwhile, here’s my prognosis for the reign of Miss Robison: she is terminally ineffectual and Miss Sturgeon should cease resuscitation efforts.