FINALLY, STURGEON ADMITS: NHS IS IN CRISIS
As health chiefs warn of looming winter chaos...
NICOLA Sturgeon finally admitted Scot- land’s NHS is ‘in crisis’ yesterday as doctors warned of a crippling winter ahead.
the First Minister conceded that the health service is under overwhelming pressure and that frontline workers need the Scottish Government to take urgent action.
But she came under fire for claiming that the crisis was entirely down to coronavirus, despite critics saying that problems had not been addressed for years before Covid-19 struck.
Miss Sturgeon said: ‘the NHS is facing crisis conditions as a result of a global pandemic. It is facing
crisis conditions here in Scotland and it is facing crisis conditions in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.’ Her comments came on a day when:
Frontline doctors warned the NHS needs 1,000 more beds and thousands more staff to cope over the winter;
The proportion of patients seen in A&E departments within the target of four hours slumped to a new low;
Firefighters and taxi drivers were drafted in to help the Scottish Ambulance Service amid growing concern about soaring waiting times.
Scottish Tory health spokesman Dr Sandesh Gulhane, who is also a GP, said: ‘Shocking ambulance waiting times are risking lives, and today’s stark figures reveal the worst A&E waiting times on record. The number of patients waiting more than half a day to be seen has almost doubled since last week. That is unbelievable.
‘Half of the patients at Scotland’s flagship hospital, the Queen Elizabeth in Glasgow, are waiting for more than the target time of four hours.
‘Behind every one of these appalling statistics are patients and their families who are suffering, but the First Minister does not think that this is a crisis. Somepeople how, she won’t admit the reality and say that word.
‘Wake up; Scotland’s NHS is at breaking point. This is a crisis.’
Miss Sturgeon said: ‘The point I will continue to make is that are working hard across our NHS... and don’t need me to worry about what we call it, they need the Government to take the action and provide the support to those on the frontline in order to help them deal with that pressure.’
She warned that it will be ‘the hardest winter that the NHS has faced in any of our memories’.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said: ‘This is a national scandal and tragedy, but don’t use the pandemic as a cover for Government failure.’
Heads of medical royal colleges have told the Mail they fear for Scotland’s health service this winter.
According to Public Health Scotland statistics, only 71.5 per cent of people who went to A&E in the week of September 12 were seen and subsequently discharged or admitted to hospital within four hours.
The Government’s target is 95 per cent. Dr John Thomson, of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Scotland, warned it will undoubtedly be ‘the most difficult winter that the Scottish NHS has ever faced’.
He added: ‘The biggest single problem is the fact that we don’t have enough beds on wards. We are about 1,000 short of the number we require for the current demand.’
He said the NHS in Scotland was 600 beds short before the pandemic, with a further 400 currently out of commission because of the need to socially distance patients.
Vacancy levels for doctors and nurses are at a record high, with more than 4,800 nursing and midwifery posts and 541 consultant posts unfilled.
Professor Michael Griffin, of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, warned: ‘We don’t have the health staff to deal with waiting lists for surgery.’
Scottish Lib Dem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said: ‘Even in the midst of this crisis, these figures are astonishing.’
Following the exchanges at Holyrood, Dr Gulhane said: ‘Finally, Nicola Sturgeon admitted our health service is in crisis, weeks after we warned that systemic failures had led Scotland’s NHS to breaking point.’
THE NHS is now in a state of virtual meltdown as coronavirus piles pressure on exhausted medics.
There is also growing demand for treatment from those who put off calling their GP during lockdowns.
They heeded the plea to protect the NHS but now many find getting face-to-face appointments with a doctor impossible.
Against this bleak backdrop, Nicola Sturgeon has admitted what we all knew and what the SNP until now had been reluctant to concede.
She told MSPs that the health service is facing ‘crisis conditions’ – just days after her Health Secretary denied that this was the case.
Humza Yousaf defied parliamentary protocol to leak to the media a plan to bring in firefighters to help paramedics.
With the ambulance service under escalating strain, taxis are being drafted in to ferry patients to hospital.
It’s a shambolic, sticking-plaster response to problems that were deeply ingrained.
Tory MSP Dr Sandesh Gulhane rightly points out that the ‘SNP hides behind Covid when warnings have gone ignored, not just for weeks but for years’.
Ministers were told three years ago that the NHS was financially unsustainable but all too often they appeared blind to the dire warnings.
Now they are facing the consequences of their inaction, with the proportion of A&E patients seen within a target of four hours plunging to a new low.
Frontline doctors also warn that the NHS needs 1,000 more beds – and thousands more staff – to weather the winter ahead.
Candidly, Miss Sturgeon admits that she considers this will be ‘the hardest winter that the NHS has faced in any of our memories’.
Yet this was an avoidable outcome – while it’s true that all healthcare systems are struggling with Covid demands, the NHS was in a weakened position at the start of the pandemic.
There can be no more excuses. They must get a grip before it spirals out of control and costs more lives.