Chamber and committees

Workforce planning issues are nothing new and Covid has brought obvious challenges, but staffing has been a problem for quite some time, despite the action that we have just heard about. Last week, the GMB union said that there was already an understaffing crisis in the Scottish Ambulance Service pre-Covid.

In the report at the weekend, a clinician said:

“Nicola Sturgeon reduced the number of nursing training places a decade ago and these people would be skilled now and able to work in the NHS. Warnings were given at the time.”

Will the cabinet secretary stop hiding behind Covid to mask the issues that were already present in the NHS, and finally accept that the Government’s lack of action has compounded the current NHS staffing crisis?

To ask the Scottish Government what its response is to reports of staffing shortages at the Queen Elizabeth university hospital that are leading to health professionals warning about patient safety. (S6T-00184)

The report from the weekend made for grim reading, and said that 339 warnings of understaffing at the hospital have been logged since 2019. There have, due to staff shortages, been 55 near-miss incidents in which there was potential for a patient to be harmed. Apparently, that is just the tip of the iceberg. One clinician has said that the Datix system, which is used to log such warnings, is complex and that the figure of 339 could easily be doubled. He also said that in some places there are

“Two nurses for 28 patients when there should be six”.

Does the cabinet secretary believe that that is acceptable? Will he apologise to the staff who are working under those conditions?

You have answered some of the questions that I was going to ask in responding to other members, but I have a follow-up question relating to the fact that your organisation has no capital budget. We have just heard from Mr Ruskell about the renewal programmes that are needed for the industry and the sector. How will the lack of capital impact your ability to kick-start that renewal?

How I frame my question will come as no surprise, as I am moving to the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee. At that committee, it was mentioned that every committee should take a health approach when considering how things are assessed and how funding is allocated.

My question is for Fiona Sturgeon Shea. Your submission has a section called “The impact of the performing arts”. That refers to health and wellbeing, which is great to see. Have you ever measured that? If you can demonstrate the health and wellbeing benefit that your sector brings, have you tried to translate that into a case for more funding? Will you explain more about the tangibles that are being realised in relation to health and wellbeing?

For all the other organisations with depleted reserves and no financial resilience, that is often where some small capital investment would have taken place. Ms Davis, is that relevant to Screen Scotland?

I will make an observation. It has been great to hear some of those examples, but they all seem to be focused on the elder end of the population—one of the examples given was about dementia. I suppose that what I am asking about with regard to health and wellbeing is how we level up the agenda for those in deprived areas and how work in the sector can provide a springboard for people in an abusive environment and give them the confidence to leave. That is the longer-term issue that I am trying to get at. We should be trying to rescue people earlier in their lives instead of trying to treat their diseases at the end of them. As I have said, though, it was great to hear some of those examples, especially with regard to dementia, so thank you very much.

I am sorry, Presiding Officer, but that caught me a bit and I welled up just there.

We have heard that our Ambulance Service is at breaking point. There can be no doubt that the Scottish NHS is in crisis and that the SNP is to blame, not the pandemic. The SNP has ignored the warning signs for years. As Jackie Baillie outlined earlier, all the concerns of stakeholders—unions, patients and healthcare professionals—have been ignored, resulting in unnecessary deaths. The failures are systemic—they are not pinch points, as Clare Adamson said. The SNP has dithered and taken far too long to respond to the crisis.

Action must be taken; the Scottish Conservatives are calling on the SNP to provide an emergency funding package and publish a detailed strategy to maximise the use of military staff to tackle the crisis. Every day, we read about cases of long waits for ambulances that sometimes lead to needless deaths and the kind of heartbreaking stories that we just heard from my colleague Craig Hoy.

The Scottish Government has requested the support of the British Army in tackling Scotland’s ambulance crisis. Although we welcome that request being made, it should have happened already; that just exposes the SNP’s shambolic handling of Scotland’s health service. In addition, firefighters and taxi services have now been drafted in to help the Scottish Ambulance Service. However, even after Humza Yousaf’s statement to the Parliament yesterday, Unite the union warned that drafting in the army and firefighters as drivers “will not be enough” to cope with the crisis. Further, my colleague Meghan Gallagher highlighted the cabinet secretary’s hypocrisy in announcing that taxi drivers will now be recruited to help transport patients to hospital for their appointments: those are the same taxi drivers who were hung out to dry during lockdown.

The pandemic has exposed the many deep-rooted weaknesses that existed in our health service long before we heard of Covid and that are due to the SNP’s mismanagement. The deep-rooted workforce crisis was mentioned by Mr Cole Hamilton in his speech. Our healthcare professionals have worked in those extreme conditions for years, juggling staff and equipment shortages, just to keep patient services going. Although there has rightly been a focus on tackling Covid in our health service, other illnesses and diseases cannot simply be forgotten about. The number of excess deaths in Scotland is tragic, and my thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one.

Yesterday, Nicola Sturgeon finally admitted that the NHS is in crisis, but Ms Sturgeon and Mr Yousaf would not confirm when an NHS winter plan would be published. It should have formed an integral part of any NHS Scotland remobilisation plan, but it has not. We are calling on the SNP-Green Government to shelve plans for £15 million in “efficiency savings”—that is not the same as cuts; they have been requested to make “efficiency savings”—in the Ambulance Service and instead announce a series of actions to tackle the crisis, including an emergency funding package that focuses on saving lives. The SNP needs to develop a real plan of action to fully remobilise our NHS, fund our Ambulance Service properly and bring waiting times back under control. Although that will be a challenge for the SNP, it is about time that we got some detail and not just soundbites.

The Scottish Conservatives will vote against the SNP amendment, and I urge Labour to vote for our amendment—laying out some of the questions that we need answers to from the Scottish Government—to strengthen Jackie Baillie’s motion.

There is a lot of synergy in what we have heard about tackling health inequalities. I am interested in what Professor Burns said about current policies focusing on a top-down approach and the need to focus on a bottom-up approach if we are to help young people when they are in difficulties and prevent their early death from suicide, violence, drugs or alcohol. We live in a world of finite resources, and we want to focus on a bottom-up approach, so what do we do about the top-down approach, because we cannot be everywhere? Right now, our resources are going towards tackling waiting lists, and hip and knee replacements are for the older generation, but you said that we need to focus on supporting the young. How do we square that with the public? How best should we do that?

I have a quick follow-up question. Professor Burns, you spoke about how difficult it is to get the data. In the example you gave, members of front-line staff showed a lot of initiative and did some digging around. In terms of data sharing, how important is it for us to have systems that talk to one another?