90,000 waiting more than 4 hours in casualty

MORE than 90,000 patients were forced to wait longer than four hours for treatment in A&E last year.

Of those, more than 1,000 waited for 12 hours before being treated.

The shocking figures, compiled by Scottish Labour, follow a week of crisis in the country’s NHS.

They put the cost of the SNP’s failure to meet its own waiting time targets into sharp context.

The Scottish Government insists 95 per cent of patients should be seen within four hours, but has missed the target repeatedly.

It wants to treat more patients, particularly elderly ones, in the community, in order to ease the pressure on hospitals.

But Labour claimed £327 million in cuts to council budgets will have the opposite effect, by ripping resources from social care departments.

It also attacked the SNP after it announced a three-year delay to four vital trauma centres last week.

Anas Sarwar, Scottish Labour health spokesman, said the waiting time figures showed the NHS was not getting the support it needed from the Government.

‘We have seen a decade of SNP mismanagement of our NHS. Under the Nationalists’ watch we have seen a workforce crisis develop across the NHS from primary care to specialist consultants,’ he said.

‘That’s what happens when the plan for the NHS is built around short-term crisis management rather than for the long term.’

More than a third of patients waiting too long for treatment in A&E were in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Scotland’s largest health board area, according to the figures.

Last week it emerged the new Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, in Glasgow, had hired a hit squad, including specialists from England, to fix problems at the £1 billion facility, which opened in 2015.

A whistleblower revealed patients on drips were being treated on trolleys in corridors, while British Red Cross crews were taking elderly and immobile patients home.

In response, the Scottish Government stressed the NHS was performing better than in other parts of the UK, with 93.1 per cent of patients seen within four hours.

Health Secretary Shona Robison insisted the number of people waiting four hours had fallen by a third since the SNP came to power.

She said: ‘We want to see long-term, sustainable change to maintain high levels of performance during peaks and troughs. We have put record investment and increased levels of staffing into our hospitals – including an extra £3 million for health boards to support their preparations for winter.’