A&E wait time target missed for f ive years

SNP’s ‘broken promises’ to Scots casualty patients

A WAITING times target f or hospital emergency patients has not been hit by the SNP Government for more than five years.

In Scotland, 98 per cent of patients should either be admitted, transferred or sent home within four hours of arriving at A&E.

But the last time the target was actually met was in September 2009. And this winter, some patients waited up to 24 hours in A&E units. January, the worst month on record in Scotland’s hospitals, saw 23 people a day waiting more than 12 hours in casualty units across the country.

The Scottish Government was forced to parachute in its own managers to the Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley, Renfrewshire, which in January made more than a quarter of patients wait for more than four hours.

Labour health spokesman Jenny Marra said: ‘We have a target in Scotland because we recognise that every patient deserves to be seen within a reasonable amount of time and the sooner they get treatment, the quicker their recovery is l i kely to be. It is unacceptable that for 284 weeks in a row, the SNP Government has missed this target. Every week is a promise to patients broken.

‘The lack of resources in our NHS has left us with nothing short of a full-blown crisis in our A&E departments and the SNP has no national plan to put things right.’

Scottish Government statistics for the week ending March 15 indicate that the target is likely to be missed for March. Only 92.2 per cent of patients were admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours, with 165 waiting more than eight hours and 19 stuck in A&E for more than 12 hours.

The latest country-wide figures in January showed only 87.1 per cent of patients fell within the four-hour target – the worst result since records began in 2007.

Last year the Mail reported how a locum doctor was paid £11,000 to fly from India to provide weekend A&E cover at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.

The overcrowding in casualty units

‘Nothing short of a full-blown crisis’

has been worsened by people turning up unnecessarily. Of the 129,629 patients who went to emergency departments in January, around twothirds were not admitted to hospital and sent home after seeing a doctor.

Health Secretary Shona Robison said: ‘It is encouraging to see that performance at Scotland’s core A&E sites is continuing to move in the right direction, with all boards across the country seeing, treating and either discharging or admitting around nine out of ten people within four hours.

‘This year has been a challenging winter, but today’s figures show that, backed up by Government support, health boards have made progress to recover from the challenges faced and improve on waiting times.’

A spokesman for Miss Robison added: ‘This is desperate hypocrisy from Jenny Marra, given that Labour never once met this target.’