Our NHS is stuck on life support - and we’re sick of SNP excuses
THREE and a half days. It’s a long time. A Bank Holiday weekend say, or a city break to London. It’s 70 per cent of most people’s working week and, well, half of a whole week.
It’s also how long one person spent waiting to be seen at an A&E department in an Ayrshire hospital in January of this year.
It’s almost impossible to imagine, waiting patiently for that long. Sitting on a hard chair with goodness knows what sort of medical condition, wondering if your name will ever be called. Yet for the hard-working NHS staff at the sharp end of the business, it is scarcely a surprise.
Take Dr Lailah Peel, who works in A&E and is chair of the British Medical Association Scotland’s junior doctors committee. She is, by any stretch of the imagination, the sort of person we should be listening to when it comes to the crisis currently enveloping emergency medicine.
Her take, then, on the latest A&E waiting times, showing that they are now the worst on record?
‘This isn’t a new problem. But we just can’t let it get any worse. The NHS is broken. Patients are dying. Staff are breaking or leaving. We just can’t go on like this. We need action. Urgently.’
Her words are deeply worrying. And for our government, should surely act as a wake-up call. But will they? As she says, this is not a new problem, and its roots were planted long before the pandemic. A&E waiting times have been increasing since 2017, with only a brief respite due to lockdown.
Dr Peel points out that while the numbers coming to A&E are still down on pre-pandemic figures, the situation within the rest of the NHS is so bad that patients are now presenting because of complications developed while awaiting treatment and scans.
‘As an A&E doctor I often tell people, “A&E is a safe space: you can come here if you are in pain, if you’re sore, if you don’t know where to go”.
‘Our A&E departments are no longer safe and what’s really concerning is our government just aren’t acting and they’re turning a blind eye.’
Ah yes, the good old blind eye – one of the SNP Government’s favourite tactics. Either that or it’s the same old excuses, and at this stage we are literally sick and tired of hearing them.
When the issue was raised at First
Minister’s Questions this week, Nicola Sturgeon was quick to point out that figures in England and Wales are worse. I’m sorry to break this to you First Minister, but this is of no relevance or consolation to the people of Scotland or our beleaguered NHS. You can’t defend your own poor performance by countering that somewhere else has it even worse. That’s like saying our military isn’t up to scratch (it is, by the way) and having someone else say, ‘Yes, but North Korea’s isn’t either’.
It is utterly pointless deflection that once again sums up the attitude of a government that’s had 15 years to sort out the NHS, yet instead appears to be running it into the ground.
HEALTH Secretary Humza Yousaf can witter on all he likes about wanting an ‘immediate improvement’ to A&E times, but those on the ground say this is next to impossible without serious reform.
When just 63.5 per cent of patients attending A&E were seen and subsequently admitted or discharged in four hours for the week ending September 11, it is highly unlikely that those numbers will soar back up to the Scottish Government’s target of 95 per cent with a snap of the health minister’s fingers. He is either extremely deluded or being very badly briefed.
Winter is on its way and with it a likely spike in Covid cases, along with the usual illnesses that cold weather brings. This year, it will also bring an even deeper crisis to the NHS.
As Dr Peel said this week: ‘It’s just getting worse.’ So too, it would seem, is our government’s response.
If, as has been touted a number of times, Sturgeon already has one foot out the door, there will be no greater emblem of this former health secretary’s time in government than the disgraceful condition of our NHS.