Chamber and committees

On a point of order, Presiding Officer. I would have voted no.

It feels like groundhog day. In September, Nicola Sturgeon told Parliament that she wanted to see immediate improvement in A and E waiting times, but for the third week in a row more than 3,000 patients waited for longer than eight hours to be seen in A and E, and 1,350 patients waited in pain and distress for more than 12 hours—not in hospital beds, but in waiting rooms and corridors. Those are shocking figures, not least because the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has repeatedly warned that such waits can lead to hundreds of avoidable deaths—each one of which is a tragedy.

The current chaos is just the tip of the iceberg, because the situation will only get worse as winter arrives. In September, well before the winter months, NHS Grampian in my region asked people to attend emergency departments only in life-threatening situations. Ambulances have been stacked outside Aberdeen royal infirmary and, because paramedics are treating patients in ambulances that are parked outside A and E doors for hours, the ambulances cannot be dispatched elsewhere.

However, the reality is that A and E waiting times are the symptom of a wider malaise that the SNP has presided over for years. Poor workforce planning and a failure to get a grip on delayed discharge mean that there are simply not enough staff and beds to care for patients. An elastic band can be stretched only so far, and we have reached breaking point.

It is abundantly clear that in order to help to prevent bed blocking we need more social care staff now, but the SNP has instead diverted hundreds of millions of pounds—or even billions, because the Scottish Government is not quite sure whether it is millions or billions—into the creation of a national care service that will not be up and running for another four years.

Meanwhile, cancer treatment waiting times are at their worst level on record, and waiting times for routine treatment continue to mount.

More than a quarter of children and young people are still not being seen by mental health services within 18 weeks, and people are having to wait hours—not minutes—for ambulances to arrive. With Humza Yousaf at the helm, our NHS is on its knees. With the resources that they have, NHS staff are working heroically to provide safe patient care. However, staff on the front line are telling us over and over that the system is simply not sustainable.

Just last month, nurses tried to share their concerns with the health secretary about their increasing workloads, their pay situation and patient safety. Shamefully, Humza Yousaf told them not to patronise him. My blood boiled when I heard that. My sister is a nurse, another is a midwife, and I speak to front-line staff every day, and that was just disgraceful. However, for Humza Yousaf, it was just another photo opportunity before retreating to self-congratulation and the platitudes of the SNP conference.

As the crisis that our NHS faces has gone from bad to worse, the Scottish Conservatives have called many times on the health secretary to completely rethink his NHS recovery plan, and we have urged him to go back to the drawing board on his NHS winter resilience plan. Enough distraction and deflection: Humza Yousaf needs to step up, because people’s lives are at stake.

Are Japan, Germany and the Netherlands the main models in that regard?

My question is for Professor Kempe. It is about quality versus consistency, in the context of care. During the consultation, Aberdeen City Council said that although the bill might improve consistency in care services, it would not necessarily improve the quality of care. What are your thoughts on that?

In those models, what are the percentage differentials for contributions to the schemes? Are salary deductions for social care 50 per cent of the deductions for healthcare, or is it difficult to say? Are the deductions on a par?

Dr Connon, you have done an excellent piece of work on what is a very complex issue. I have a question about funding models. I think that you said that, in Japan, healthcare was differentiated from social care. In the Japanese model, or in other models, are salary deductions made from a certain age for healthcare and, separately, for social care? Does that happen just in Japan or are there any other countries—say, Singapore—where it happens?

Thank you, convener. I think that my question would be answered if Professor Glasby could share with us the figures that he mentioned.

I have a question for Mr Dunlop. Earlier this year, sportscotland was proactive in commissioning the independent review into racism in cricket, but that was after allegations had emerged in public. What oversight and involvement did sportscotland have before that?

You knew about the issue, but not the size and scale of it.

It is clear that wholesale change is needed at Cricket Scotland. What funding is in place to support that change?