£400m bed blocking cost under SNP
THREE years of SNP ‘broken promises’ on bed blocking has cost the NHS nearly £400million, Labour claims.
Health Secretary Shona Robison promised in 2015 to eradicate the problem whereby patients cannot be discharged from hospital because no social care package is available.
But yesterday Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said bed blocking was still taking place – and had cost the NHS £392million since 2015.
Miss Robison told the BBC in February 2015 that she wanted to ‘eradicate’ delayed discharge ‘over the course of this year’ and that she was ‘absolutely determined to do that’.
Miss Sturgeon also told the SNP conference in 2011 that the problem ‘wastes NHS resources’ and ‘robs older people of their quality of life’.
At First Minister’s Questions yesterday, Mr Leonard said: ‘The question that I asked was how much Shona Robison’s broken promises on delayed discharge had cost the health service in Scotland since 2015. The answer is £392million.
‘This week, the Scottish Government was forced to admit that it has not met its accident and emergency waiting times target for eight consecutive months.
‘Hundreds of operations are being cancelled every single month; waiting times are up year on year; and our hard-working NHS staff are overstretched and undervalued. They deserve better than that. Patients deserve better than that. The people of Scotland deserve better than that, and they deserve a health secretary who is up to the job. When will the First Minister finally put patients before party and accept at long last that the time has come for her health secretary to go?’
Miss Sturgeon said there had been a 24 per cent reduction in bed blocking since Miss Robison became Health Secretary.
On the call for her to be sacked from the health brief, Miss Sturgeon said: ‘Richard Leonard has just exposed that he does not really care about the patients; this is all about politics, as far as he is concerned.
‘Let me talk about A&E, as Richard Leonard raised it. It is very positive news and a real credit to those working in our NHS that, for three years in a row now, Scotland has had the best A&E performances in the whole of the United Kingdom – including Labour-run Wales, of course.
‘As I have said twice now, there has been a 24 per cent reduction in the number of bed days lost to delayed discharges since Shona Robison became health secretary.’
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie also criticised the SNP’s performance on the NHS. He said: ‘It is time for the First Minister to open her eyes. The British Medical Association has made the situation clear: it described it as a “lack of substantive progress”.
‘Has not the time come for the First Minister to admit the scale of the problem and to replace the Cabinet Secretary for Health, who cannot control it? For goodness sake, will the First Minister take the summer to replace her health team, or will parliament have to do it for her in the autumn?’