Chamber and committees

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. My app would not connect. I would have voted yes.

I do not believe that I have time to take an intervention from the minister.

Unison is calling for the process of the creation of a national care service to be paused and for us to think again about the detail.

I will conclude, Presiding Officer. I plead with the health secretary to show some humility and to listen to the experience of staff who are on the front line and of patients who have witnessed the crumbling foundations of our NHS with their own eyes. Our doctors, nurses and support and social care staff deserve so much better than hollow words. Patients across Scotland deserve better than the underwhelming action of the SNP Government. We on these benches will always fight to protect our NHS. Will the cabinet secretary?

Dr Peel, who I just mentioned, said—

I note the member’s comment about sweeping generalisations and his previous comment during an intervention about exaggeration. Will he clarify whether he agrees with the clinicians who are saying that the NHS is struggling and suffering and is on its knees?

If the member had listened to what I said, he would have heard me quote a front-line clinician, who pointed out that Covid, Strep A and flu—all the issues that we have heard about—are exacerbating an issue that has been 15 years in the making. This crisis has been building year on year and this Government has not sought to address it appropriately, because its recovery plan does not even come close to addressing the scale of the problem that is facing our health service.

This is a twin crisis—it is a twin failure of Government in both healthcare and social care. That is why we need a joined-up approach to deal with the problem, because we will not be able to deal with the issues that are facing our health service if we do not address social care.

This morning, along with Jackie Baillie and Anas Sarwar, I met a range of stakeholders, including people on the front line of delivering social care. Their testimony on the scale of the challenge being faced in social care was powerful and they were clear in stating that the Scottish Government is not doing enough to address the key problems in social care.

As we meet to debate this issue in this place, outside our NHS continues to face a huge crisis. Yet again, it is Scottish Labour, during Opposition business time, that has had to bring the issues that Jackie Baillie outlined in her opening speech to the chamber to ensure that the Government can be held to account.

Our thoughts are with all our dedicated and hard-working staff who are on the front line of our NHS. Never before have our accident and emergency departments had so many patients waiting more than 12 hours to be assessed. Never before have we experienced such a level of delayed discharge, with record numbers of patients stuck in hospital because they cannot secure an appropriate care package.

Tragically, as we have seen many times before, there is also declining performance in cancer treatment. The Scottish Government has failed to meet its own 62-day cancer treatment standard since 2012. All the statistics that we see week in, week out are not just box-ticking exercises; they are more fundamental than that. This is about people’s lives and about improving outcomes by ensuring that people have a higher likelihood of being treated before their condition worsens. In many cases, treatment can be the difference between surviving and recovering, and dying.

Indeed, waits of more than eight hours in accident and emergency departments have already led to avoidable deaths in our hospitals.

“Patients who need to be in intensive care or high dependency units are sitting in A and E departments for hours waiting, it is just not safe ... Patient safety is at risk every day in our A and Es across Scotland. You just can’t give the care you want to give to patients.”

Those are not my words; they are the words of Dr Lailah Peel, the deputy chair of the BMA in Scotland, another of those front-line voices that we have heard throughout the debate and which, sadly, have been characterised as exaggerated by members on the SNP benches.

However, that is the reality. It is the reality that I have heard; it is the reality that we have heard from colleagues across the chamber. In response, the cabinet secretary has sought—as he always does—to absolve himself of responsibility by lining up excuse after excuse. I have to say to the cabinet secretary that I found his weaponising of Covid in his remarks most unedifying, because the reality is that clinicians and those on the front line are saying that the cause of the current crisis is not about Covid; it is not about Strep A, the flu or winter pressures. It is about years of mismanagement and decline.

I am very grateful, Presiding Officer.

Perhaps the cabinet secretary does not want to listen to what I heard from social care workers today, which is that they have grave concerns about the situation in social care, that the National Care Service (Scotland) Bill is ill thought out and should be stopped, and that we should come back around the table to get it right.

I heard Gillian Martin quote Unison saying that it is in support of the bill—that is certainly not the conversation that I had with the union this morning.

The member mentioned pay. We know that pay in the social care sector is an extremely important issue, as my colleague Jackie Baillie outlined. In the Green manifesto, the party was committed to paying £15 an hour for social care workers. Why did that disappear in the vaunted Bute house agreement?

I am going to quote her:

“The word unprecedented is being used a lot to describe the ... crisis ... It makes it sound like the current situation wasn’t entirely predictable or preventable ... Like this isn’t a crisis years in the making.”

Front-line workers are sick and tired of not being listened to by the Government and they are appalled by moves, as they see it, to blame patients for the appalling situation in our NHS.

Presiding Officer, our national health service is battling for survival in this, the gravest of moments that it has faced since its establishment by the Labour Party. The gravity of the situation demands a response from the Scottish Government of a proportionate magnitude. It needs more than the reactive sticking-plaster proposals from the First Minister and the health secretary.

I am not going to take a lecture from the cabinet secretary about what I should—[Interruption.] The cabinet secretary is obviously quite upset by my response. [Interruption.] There needs to be a conversation about his national care service plans because they are where we could take money from in order to put it into the front line on social care—[Interruption.] We will make our budget proposals, as we always do, and we will provide that information to the cabinet secretary.

I go back now to my point—[Interruption.]

The cabinet secretary does not want to listen.