Ills of health service require radical cure

ANYONE with even the slightest experience of a Scottish winter will know that icy conditions are par for the course.

And as sure as the temperatures plummet, so more people turn up at their GP surgery complaining of colds and flu.

These are ineluctable facts – yet they would appear to have escaped the attention of NHS managers who blame inclement weather conditions and a rise in the number of patients seeking treatment for flu-like symptoms for the dismal failure of Scotland’s accident and emergency units to meet waiting time targets before Christmas,

The Scottish Government says 95 per cent of those attending a casualty unit should be seen within four hours, yet in the week ending December 17, only 81.1 per cent of patients were seen.

According to health service officials, ‘exceptional’ demand on A&E units is the fault of icy weather.

Surely we are not expected to believe that the brightest and best of the upper echelons of NHS management did not foresee that a Scottish winter might involve the presence of ice?

There are serious questions to be asked about the obsession – shared by all major parties – with waiting time targets. In seeing that all manner of targets – sometimes involving quite minor ailments – are met, is the NHS now properly targeting its resources?

Waiting time targets are a fixation of politicians who gravitate towards the easily explained, but medical staff don’t always share MSPs’ enthusiasm for what many consider an exercise in box-ticking rather than a strategy based on clinical priorities.

On its way to forming a government a decade ago, the SNP audaciously claimed to be the true custodians of the NHS. Only a vote for the Scottish Nationalists would protect the health service.

But once in power the SNP took a decidedly hands-off approach to the NHS, failing to instigate reform.

Entirely predictable weather conditions may be to blame for the latest failure to meet waiting time targets, but underlying all current problems in the NHS is the Scottish Government’s refusal to take the radical steps – in terms of funding and service provision – needed to make the service fit for purpose.