NHS staff ‘struggling’

HOSPITALS are understaffed and struggling to cope with an increase in the number of patients, Nicola Sturgeon has been warned.

Tory MSP Sue Webber yesterday highlighted concerns raised by NHS staff who say the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank, Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow and the city’s Royal Hospital for Children are ‘seriously understaffed and struggling to cope with the volume of patients’.

At First Minister’s Questions, Miss Webber said treatment at each site is ‘severely limited’ and she asked whether any departments have been closed to new patients and elective surgery stopped.

Miss Sturgeon said: ‘A number of health boards are taking decisions to pause temporarily

elective surgery to enable them to deal with emergency services.’

She added that health boards will be supported to take the decisions they consider appropriate.

Following the comments, Miss Webber, the Scottish Conservative public health spokesman, said: ‘Patients across Scotland have already been waiting far too long for vital treatments and procedures to take place.

‘The pandemic has exposed the weaknesses that existed in the health service, due to the SNP’s mismanagement, long before we had heard of Covid.

‘It is deeply concerning elective surgeries are currently being postponed. That is only going to create more anxiety among patients, many of whom are lying waiting in severe pain.’