Shameful betrayal of a frail 96-year-old that exposes the lack of humanity at the very top of the SNP

EVELYN Gaw was in her early twenties when the National Health Service was introduced in 1948 under Labour prime minister Clement Attlee.

It is still here – in name at least – some 74 years later.

Its three core principles were the following: that it met the needs of everyone, that it was free at the point of delivery and that it was based on clinical need, not ability to pay.

Mrs Gaw, a former primary school headmistress from Ayrshire, is still here too.

She is now 96 and, according to her GP son Norrie, ‘usually fit as a fiddle’.

That she has remained in good health well into her 10th decade, lives alone and, with the help of ‘wonderful carers’, maintains a degree of independence is both remarkable and heart-warming. But one imagines Mrs Gaw was acutely aware that, one day, her hour of need would come.

Comfort

It came suddenly last week with a chest infection that ‘wiped her off her feet’ and resulted in her collapsing. She needed to be in hospital urgently and an ambulance conveyed her there.

It was some small comfort, you would think, to be safely en route to the best place for her in a rare medical crisis. Good to know that, when the emergency finally came, the NHS had her back.

Except that, on arrival at University Hospital Crosshouse in Kilmarnock, that sense of reassurance quickly evaporated. In its place came horror, indignity, tears and confusion.

The reason? The hospital did not have a bed available for a nonagenarian greatgrandmother to 12 who had just been diagnosed with pneumonia.

In her hour of need, some three-quarters of a century after the launch of the proudest achievement of any Labour government, Mrs Gaw was shamefully placed on a trolley in a draughty Accident & Emergency corridor to await a change in the oversubscribed hospital’s circumstances. That wait took 40 hours.

We do not need to imagine Mrs Gaw’s distress as the awful realisation dawned that this was the best the NHS had to offer her at this busy time because her son was there to witness it and he has described it in detail.

Dr Gaw, a GP of 39 years, said his mother ‘grabbed my hand and didn’t want me to leave her side’.

He added: ‘She hated it. She was totally distressed, frightened, crying, breathless and disorientated. It was horrible to see and horrible to have to leave her.’

It should be noted that he paid tribute to the staff who were ‘clearly utterly exhausted but fantastic and very apologetic’.

The same, as we will see later, can hardly be said of Health Secretary Humza Yousaf who, when informed of Mrs Gaw’s ordeal during a Holyrood debate this week, failed even to acknowledge it.

But let us remain a little longer with Mrs Gaw in that draughty overspill corridor – for 40 hours is an awfully long time to be left with your thoughts after a pneumonia diagnosis – and think for a moment how we might react if, in our twilight years, this was what lay in store in our own hour of need.

I suspect I, too, would not want to be left alone. I would look to family members to do something and I have little doubt they would try their damnedest.

But, in the event of their failure, in a phase beyond the fears and tears and wretchedness, I imagine a sense of fatalism would kick in – fatalism tinged with rage, for I had been sold a lie.

Our taxes cover many bases. They help others in greater need than ourselves, maintain society’s infrastructure, pay for education, public safety and national defence to name just a few of the areas where our earnings are spent. They fund the NHS too, representing an investment in the health and wellbeing of our fellow citizens, our friends, our loved ones and, ultimately, ourselves.

Yes, we invest in the day or days, long in the future we hope, when we may require the NHS to uphold those three core principles on our own behalf and trust that the contract will be honoured.

Lying there for the best part of two days on a trolley in a corridor lined with fellow patients, did Mrs Gaw wonder to herself about this longstanding contract with the state or was her distress too acute to do so?

Either way, Mr Yousaf should wonder to himself about it long and hard. Why on earth was a 96-year-old former headmistress with pneumonia waiting miserable hour after hour for the bed she desperately needed?

What befuddled version of ‘clinical need’ served up such a fate for a woman in extreme old age?

Dignity

How to take this highly disturbing information on board and formulate a response which restores a measure of the dignity her appalling experience stripped away – and reassures pensioners that this is not the hell that awaits if they are unwise enough to fall ill.

But no such introspection was evident from the Health Secretary as Mrs Gaw’s searing 40 hours were narrated to him in the Scottish parliament on Wednesday.

Indeed, he had nothing whatever to say about Mrs Gaw. Rather, he was anxious to let it be known that a marginal improvement had been seen in this week’s A&E waiting time figures.

An improvement, that is, on last week when the figures were the worst since records began, with 36.5 per cent of patients still waiting to be seen after the four-hour target had come and gone.

But not an improvement on last winter when, even though the numbers were then the worst on record, they were still better than this week’s 33.8 per cent.

But even if there were any encouragement to be taken from the figures – which there plainly is not given the government target of 95 per cent of A&E patients seen within four hours – there are times when statistics are simply not the answer, however badly under-performing ministers may wish to hide behind them.

Compassion

There are times when they compound the offence, when compassion, humanity and, above all, humility were the ingredients the answer needed.

The narration in parliament by Conservative health spokesman Dr Sandesh Gulhane of Mrs Gaw’s bleak wait for NHS Scotland to respond in her hour of need was just such a time.

In failing to recognise it, Mr Yousaf brought more doubt on his suitability for his role than perhaps statistics ever could. His response put politics first, people second.

The news about Mrs Gaw is more encouraging. Now finally ensconced in a ward bed, she is attended by ‘fabulous staff’ and her condition is said to be improving.

Fingers crossed she will be back home soon and pressing on in robust health towards her centenary. But while she may wish to put her ordeal to the back of her mind, we should think on it a while.

Is this the NHS of today and what remains of the three guiding principles? Why so little when it is staffed with such dedicated and selfless professionals?

Did a coronavirus pandemic really bring the NHS to this? Or did the rot develop under the weight of chronic mismanagement and over-promoted, mealy-mouthed politicians, of whom Mr Yousaf is the latest sorry example?