Crisis-hit health services need to be protected

As September draws to a close, thoughts turn to the approach of winter.

The increased pressure that winter brings for our health service is now an annual inevitability. This year, as the continued impacts of the pandemic are felt, winter has come early.

Ongoing delays to vital services from ambulances to A&E, understaffing, a lack of beds and a workforce pushed to the limit. We have already seen some health boards shift back to cancelling non-essential operations amid statements that current pressures on services are the worst of the whole pandemic. Many of those patients had already faced lengthy waits as a result of backlogs.

Ambulance waiting times are the worst on record. Patients in need are facing distressing delays and in extreme cases lives have been lost. Ambulance staff are under huge pressure and their mental health is suffering, with thousands of working days lost as a result.

Across our health services people in need are having to wait. Almost 8000 patients waited over four hours to be treated at A&E. One in 20 patients in pain are waiting over a year for treatment. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services are at the highest on record. This situation may have been exacerbated by the events of the past 18 months but it is not caused by the pandemic, it has been brewing for far longer.

The waiting time target for A&E has not been met once in the nine years since it was introduced, and this is a critical factor for ambulance delays. Combined with delayed discharges from hospitals there are simply not enough beds available. Patients, health professionals and unions have continued to raise concerns but the response has been lacking.

We are now at a point where the army, fire service and taxi drivers have been called in to support health service delivery.

It is of course welcome they can help alleviate the immediate issues but that they are needed at all is the result of the underlying and systematic problems faced by the ambulance service and the wider health and social care service that predate the pandemic. The number of available beds and training places for staff have been reducing for years, and the decision to close NHS Louisa Jordan now looks premature.

Scottish Labour led a debate in the Parliament calling for long and short term action to be put in place. Further steps are essential as winter approaches, from the use of field hospitals and other temporary admission units to the encouraging of staff to return to mitigate shortages in the workforce. But we also need to see vastly improved long term planning and additional resources that acknowledge the interconnected nature of waiting times, lack of beds and overworked staff.

Staff wellbeing must be prioritised so we can reduce stress and improve welfare alongside increasing capacity across the NHS.

Last year members of parliament and the public alike took to their doorsteps to pay tribute to our NHS staff and other frontline workers. The work that our health and social care staff, ambulance staff, doctors, nurses and other health workers do is rightly praised but it is not enough for us to thank them. We must better protect them and support them. The NHS is a precious public service but its staff and patients need more than warm words this winter.

NHS workers need more than warm words this winter