Patients want discharged from hospital before Christmas, says Labour leader.
By Bill Heaney
For people who keep telling others to behave themselves, Scotland’s parliamentarians are a real rowdy bunch.
Labour leader Anas Sarwar was the first target for howling derison from back bench MSPs when he raised the interminal question of the sorry state of the NHS.
He said: “When the Parliament returns after the coming recess, it will be the start of winter. We have a winter NHS crisis every year, but the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said that there is a winter crisis every day and that the Government continues to disregard the urgent need to keep patients moving through the system.”
As the derision descended, Mr Sarwar departed from his question: “I do not know why members are heckling people who are struggling to get NHS treatment. I am talking about their constituents. That behaviour tells us everything that we need to know about Scottish National Party members’ priorities.
Labour leader Anas Sarwar has asked John Swinney to get hospital patients home for Christmas.
“The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said that there is an urgent need to keep patients moving through the system.
“Three key factors exacerbate the crisis: the number of beds and resources that are lost due to delayed discharge, patients not being treated due to long waits and a lack of capacity that leaves accident and emergency departments overwhelmed. We need meaningful action.
“An estimated 1,500 people are stuck in hospital because of a lack of care packages. Can the First Minister guarantee that social care packages will be in place for all those who are needlessly stuck in hospital, so that they can get home for Christmas?”
“We are working with individual partnerships [Health and Social Care Partnerships] to reduce the level of delayed discharge in different parts of the country.
“There is significant variation around the country: some parts of the country have very low numbers of patients who are in hospital but who could be in other care settings or at home, whereas those numbers are too high in other parts of the country.
“I assure Mr Sarwar that deep and intense work is going on with individual partnerships to reduce levels of delayed discharge and to ensure that the objective that he puts to me, which is one that I want to deliver, can be achieved as we approach winter.”
Dame Jackie Baillie revealed just last week that more than 500 people are in the queue for care home places in her Dumbarton constituency.
He added: “Long waits pile even more pressure on our NHS during winter. Information obtained following a freedom of information request has revealed shockingly long waits for treatment.
“Some people have been waiting since 2017 for urology treatment, which is a seven-year wait; some have been waiting for general surgery since 2018, which is more than six years; and some have waited more than five years for ophthalmology, gynaecology or orthopaedic treatment, among others. That is scandalous.
“The SNP promised to clear waits of more than two years by September 2022, but it has utterly failed. People who go untreated often end up in emergency departments as their condition deteriorates, which places even more pressure on NHS services. Can the First Minister guarantee that every patient who has already waited for more than two years will be treated by Christmas?”
He added:”The problems are an accumulation of the impact of delays to treatment because of the pandemic. On waiting times, the figures that I just put on the record show the 10th quarterly increase in a row and are 9.9 per cent higher than they were during the same period last year.
“That comes on top of the fact that, over the past 12 months, there has been a 5.1 per cent increase in the number of operations performed, principally with regard to orthopaedic treatment and others.
“We are seeing an improvement in national health service capability and in its capacity to impact on the waits that Mr Sarwar put to me, but we have significant challenges to overcome as a consequence of the pandemic.
“The Government is focusing resources through the investments that we are making. In this financial year, we have allocated more than £19.5 billion—a record amount of funding—to the national health service to ensure that the resources are in place to address these challenges.”
“There is no commitment to guarantee care packages for the 1,500 people who are needlessly stuck in hospital in order to free up much-needed beds and resources. There is no commitment to clear long waits of more than two years by Christmas, which means patients suffering and pressures being added to A and E departments. Those solutions would unlock much-needed capacity in our NHS.
“The health secretary [Neril Gray] published his winter preparedness plan two weeks ago, but it has already been dismissed by key figures in our NHS. Rather than having an actual plan for winter, the Government is supposedly moving to year-round surge planning.
“Despite what the health secretary says, that proves that we have a crisis in our NHS all year round—a permanent crisis in our NHS.
“Will the First Minister listen to doctors and nurses on the front line and come back to the Parliament with an actual plan to meet the scale of the NHS crisis this winter?”
“We have to recognise that the Government can allocate only the resources that it has at its disposal, and we are allocating a record amount of funding. As Mr Sarwar knows, because we have rehearsed these points many times before, the climate of austerity that we have wrestled with for the past 14 years from the Conservative Government places significant challenges on our resources, but we have exceeded the amount of money that was allocated through the Barnett formula to the health service because of the commitment of this [Scottish] Government.
“Mr Sarwar thinks that it would help to follow his approach on taxation, which would reduce public expenditure in Scotland by £1.5 billion. That would not help the national health service one little bit. On funding, as the United Kingdom Secretary of State for Health and Social Care said when he was in opposition all roads do lead back to Westminster.”
Mr Swinney said they would wait to find out what the UK Labour Government’s budget says on October 30 when the Scottish Parliament comes back after the October recess.
He concluded: “Let us see whether the Labour Party breaks with austerity and whether Labour is prepared to invest, because what Mr Sarwar has put to me today is a demand for more investment, but we are not getting that from the Labour Government.”