Chamber and committees

As I have listened to this afternoon’s debate, it has been painfully clear that this SNP-Green Government has run out of ideas and has run out of road. The cabinet secretary says that the NHS is facing challenges. The fact is that under Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s NHS is not just on life support—

Presiding Officer, I have only just begun. I might look keen, but I would like to continue.

As we have heard today, we are seeing patients stuck in ambulances on the hospital forecourt, week after week of record waiting times in A and E, moving medical goal posts, a delayed-discharge crisis, non-elective surgery paused and massive backlogs in potentially life-saving treatments, diagnostic tests and operations. There are so many people in pain.

Dr Sandesh Gulhane said that the SNP Government will blame Covid: true to form, Emma Roddick and Humza Yousaf blamed Covid.

The majority of speakers in today’s debate have exposed the fact that the underlying problems are long in the making. I ask Emma Roddick, who talked about fingers in ears, to listen to what has been said today. Paul Sweeney shared harrowing stories and Sarah Boyack talked about preventative care being stopped. We have heard so many stories of people who are frustrated, upset, forgotten or abandoned.

NHS front-line workers are telling us time and again that patient safety is at risk every day. Dedicated staff in our NHS are exhausted, disheartened and in disbelief. Not surprisingly, as Michael Marra has flagged, clinicians are thinking of chucking it in.

Alex Cole-Hamilton exposed the shocking story of a refugee who had to go back to war-torn Kiev for her medical treatment. However, John Mason had the temerity to accuse Jackie Baillie of exaggerating the crisis. He should pause on that and try telling it to the patient in Inverness who has been waiting 12 weeks for a GP telephone appointment, to the patient who has been waiting four years for a hip replacement, or to someone who has been waiting for life-changing cancer treatment. I ask Gillian Martin who it is that is “hiding behind the couch.”

Imagine how those patients felt on Monday, when the First Minister used a press conference on the crisis in our NHS to grandstand on the constitutional wrangling over the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill on the same day that it emerged that one patient in my region, under NHS Grampian, had waited five years for a simple computed tomography—CT—scan.

As we have witnessed today, all the SNP does is sing from the same songbook. It deflects, distracts and—as we have heard again and again today—it blames the UK Government or, as David Torrance did, blames Labour for what it did more than 15 years ago. Really? Emma Roddick, who obviously does not understand employment legislation, has blamed the UK Government for the ball and chain on that legislation. Poppycock!

However, the question remains: how can the NHS come back from the brink after 15 years of mismanagement under the SNP Government? We have sensible policy proposals. The cabinet secretary asked earlier where our ideas are. He has run out of ideas; he is asking us for them. We have published ideas on crisis maximum waiting times, an electronic repeat prescription system, an app for live hospital waiting times; and “prehab”—[Interruption.]

The cabinet secretary, from a sedentary position, said, “Do it tomorrow”—I say to him that we have been waiting 15 years.

Our published proposals could make a real and defining difference, not just to how the NHS works and the pressures that it faces, but to patients’ experience of the system. If the cabinet secretary would like some ideas because he has run out of them, we will gladly meet him to share ours.

On the wider health system, we know that delayed discharge is a massive issue that prevents the flow of patients through the NHS from A and E on to other wards. More often than not, bed blocking is caused by a lack of social care packages at home or in the community, thanks in part to savage funding cuts to local authorities by the SNP Government.

However, instead of going full throttle to address the problem now, the SNP, in its wisdom, has decided to introduce legislation to set up a centralising national care service three years down the road with soaring cost implications for the public purse. The reality is that the 300 additional care home beds that the health secretary announced will not cut it when more than 1,700 people in hospital are clinically safe to leave but cannot do so.

On staffing, we know that the NHS workforce is massively understaffed with high vacancy rates. In fact, figures from the BMA suggest that consultant vacancies are more than double the Scottish Government’s official figures. There is still no proper workforce plan. The NHS will continue to haemorrhage staff if working conditions do not improve. That is not the exception; it is the norm, so we must urgently find ways to address the situation.

Thank you.

Over the festive period, NHS Grampian made an extraordinary plea on social media for exhausted NHS staff to come in on their days off. Dr Iain Kennedy—who is chairman of the British Medical Association Scotland, as members will know—said that that intervention should

“close any debate that the NHS is broken”.

The issue of how strapped for staff NHS Grampian is has been well publicised. Does the cabinet secretary think that that will happen more often? Is it acceptable for that to become the norm?

Since June last year, I have repeatedly tried to ask the Scottish Government when a women’s health champion will be appointed. The Minister for Public Health, Women’s Health and Sport and even the First Minister have deployed every delaying tactic in the book, and the can is just being kicked down the road. The petition on the services in Caithness and Sutherland underscores why a women’s health champion is so important to Scotland. Why is a women’s health champion not a priority for the Scottish Government? Can you say today when an appointment will be made?

Hello, and thank you, cabinet secretary. I acknowledge that you do not want to provide the budget allocation for NHS 24 until this afternoon’s statement, although I am disappointed to hear that. I raised NHS 24 capacity with you in October, and, at the time, you emphasised the additional recruitment that will take place to support that crucial service. Can you at least indicate this morning, cabinet secretary, how many new NHS 24 staff have been put in place since you made that pledge in October and how many you intend to recruit over the coming weeks?

Thank you.

Cabinet secretary, the total maintenance backlog bill across Scotland’s 14 health boards has, shockingly, reached more than £1.5 billion. What budgetary provision is in place to cover that bill? Why is the 2021 commitment to invest £10 billion over the next decade to replace and refurbish health infrastructure not mentioned in the 2022 programme for government or in the 2023-24 budget?

On Tuesday night, law-abiding women were threatened with arrest as they observed the proceedings from the Scottish Parliament’s public gallery. It will not end there.

As the parliamentary passage of the bill reaches its conclusion, I still believe that the intent behind it was good, but it remains the case for me that the unintended consequences for women, girls and young people will be far greater. From the age of application to access to single-sex spaces and safeguards against sex offenders exploiting the system, there are still massive question marks over the safety of the operation of the bill. For those reasons, I will be unable to support it when we vote on it.

Thank you for allowing an additional speaker today, Presiding Officer.

I spent many years helping organisations to improve inclusion in the workplace. It is part of my DNA. I have made sure in my job that everyone, whether they are female, male, gay, transitioning or with a disability, is physically and psychologically safe at work. As a human resources director and now as a legislator, the safety of others is my priority.

However, in recent months, I have been inundated with emails from people who are not just sceptical about the plans but deeply, deeply worried. They know that the bill is not just simplifying the process to get a piece of paper. They know that it makes it easier for people to legally change their sex and that it opens the door to single-sex spaces to an undefined group of people.

Women and girls are not victims, but they are victimised. This is not about a competition of rights. It is about creating the right conditions for the co-existence of those rights. This bill simply does not do that.

We have been told by the SNP that there is no need to press pause on the bill and examine the implications of a major intervention by the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls or last week’s court ruling on the definition of a woman. Scrutiny and debate matter to the SNP only when that suits it. That is shameful. The sad truth is that the passage of the bill has shattered my confidence in our democratic institutions.

Women’s organisations were an afterthought prior to the introduction of the bill. Every party save the Scottish Conservatives is whipping the vote. At stage 1 and this week, a handful of SNP MSPs broke ranks, and they should be applauded for doing so. That was a much-needed departure from the authoritarian ideologues who preside over the SNP-Green Government. I say to those MSPs on the Labour and SNP benches who fear the reproaches from their party whips or the effect on their careers more than the repercussions of the bill for women and girls that there is still time to choose courage over cowardice. Collectivism should not trump their conscience.

My amendments yesterday would at least have placed a duty on ministers to report on the bill’s impact on women and girls, who risk being collateral damage in the SNP-Green Government’s single-minded pursuit of self-ID.

However, something else is happening—an insidious creep that started with women being branded as bigots and transphobes for raising concerns over their rights and safety. A few weeks ago, women wearing suffragette scarves were told to remove them or leave the meeting of a parliamentary committee that was scrutinising the bill in Scotland’s own seat of democracy. Last week, women were prevented from assembling in an academic institution to discuss the issues arising in the documentary “Adult Human Female”, their right to freedom of speech being not just curtailed, but cut off completely.