Chamber and committees

I thank the cabinet secretary for an advance copy of her statement and very much welcome the public awareness campaign that she announced.

The cabinet secretary will be aware that A and E figures published this week revealed that more than 1,600 patients at Edinburgh Royal infirmary waited more than four hours and that more than 1,200 at Glasgow’s Queen Elizabeth university hospital did so. Those are the worst weekly figures since records began. That pressure on A and E is demonstrated by increasing corridor care, ambulances stacked up outside and staff burnout. That results in poorer outcomes for patients, and we know from modelling that has been done by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine that those delays often have profound consequences, resulting in hundreds of avoidable excess deaths.

The level of delayed discharge remains stubbornly high, and that causes even more pressure on A and E, because hospitals are operating at dangerous levels of capacity.

The cabinet secretary knows that we have these statements every year and it seems that little changes. Therefore, I ask her what she will regard as a measure of success. Will it be a drop in the level of delayed discharge? Will it be meeting the four-hour waiting time standard? Will it be ambulance turnaround times reducing? Will it be ending dangerous corridor care? The cabinet secretary was absolutely right to say that this issue is about people, so what difference will people and staff actually see?

I thank Patricia Gibson for securing time for the debate and for her very powerful contribution, and I associate myself with all her remarks and her requests of the minister. Her words will give comfort to others in knowing that they are not alone, and that is the ethos of baby loss awareness week.

Presiding Officer, I had sought permission to leave the debate early as I am sponsoring an event in Parliament this evening, but I will now stay.

Baby loss is something that many families live with long after it occurs. It is the loss of a life that might have been, and a future that parents had imagined. When a woman or a family leaves hospital, the clinical care ends, but the grief does not. This week is an opportunity to remember that behind every experience of baby loss is a person, a family and a story.

For many people, the grief can be incredibly lonely, and that is why talking matters. I hope that women and men feel able to share their stories with those around them because, by speaking openly, they can let others know that their grief is real and their feelings are valid. They are doing a service to those around them by sharing their experiences with others who have experienced something similar.

This year's theme, “Together, we care”, focuses on nurturing mental and physical wellbeing. We must recognise our responsibility to see that services are appropriate to the mental and physical toll of baby loss and are there for those who need them. A parent who needs counselling in the weeks and months following baby loss should not have to wait, search endlessly or pay for the support that they need. Our duty does not end with offering condolences; we have a responsibility to take meaningful action and provide tangible support to families at one of the most painful moments of their lives.

We cannot erase the pain of losing a baby, but we can change how our society, and our healthcare system, respond to families that are experiencing that loss. First, we need to address the consistency and quality of care. Every hospital in Scotland should have appropriate, dedicated spaces for bereavement care. No grieving parent should have to sit in a maternity ward, surrounded by the sounds and cries of newborn babies, immediately after being told that they have lost their own child. Compassion should not depend on which hospital someone attends.

Equally, support cannot end when a family leaves hospital, because women need access to specialist, long-term psychological support following baby loss. We need adequately funded, easily accessible mental health support that recognises the trauma that is associated with miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death. That applies to fathers, too.

Supporting families also means preventing avoidable loss wherever we can. A briefing from Sands and Tommy’s has highlighted serious concerns about the quality and consistency of pregnancy-loss care in Scotland. We have heard directly in the Parliament, too, from families that are struggling to access care because the “Delivery Framework for Miscarriage Care in Scotland” is largely undelivered.

I pay tribute to the charities and the healthcare professionals and, above all, to the bereaved parents who have been brave enough to share their experiences and campaign for change. Let us honour them today with not only our words but our decisions, through better services, stronger standards and meaningful action. To repeat what Patricia Gibson said, let us make that part of the review.

18:14

The Scottish Government’s evidence review that led to the neonatal centralisation plan shows that only two of the 17 peer-reviewed papers even remotely supported the Government’s position. Several papers highlighted serious safety concerns about transporting very pre-term babies in the days after birth. Can the minister point to any changes that have been made to minimise the danger of transporting pre-term babies and to avoid outcomes being poorer for the sickest babies as a result of its neonatal centralisation plans?

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

In the Highlands as well as in other parts of Scotland, the centralisation of sexual health services has meant long waiting lists and poorer access for women. The cabinet secretary is right to say that that is acknowledged in the women’s health plan, but there does not appear to be any additional funding to address the problem. Does the cabinet secretary acknowledge that women are tired of being shuffled around by a Government that is failing to prioritise women’s health and will she bring forward a plan to bring routine sexual healthcare back into community settings, accompanied by funding to meet the backlog?

The minister will of course remember that, when that fund first started, it had a balance, if you like, of £5 million available for people. That has dropped by £1.8 million, because of the tightness of the eligibility criteria. Surely restoring the fund to the level that it was once at was would enable many more people to benefit from it, with no additional cost to the Scottish Government. Surely that is something that the minister would agree with.

I thank the minister for the advance copy of her statement.

The number of drug deaths is a national scandal, with an 11 per cent increase in one year alone. Each of those deaths is a human tragedy, and my thoughts are of course with the families who have lost loved ones. However, seven years on from when the Scottish National Party Government declared a public health emergency, the numbers are increasing, and remain the worst in the United Kingdom and in Europe.

I have repeatedly warned the Government about the danger of synthetic opioids, in every year since 2023. Drug checking facilities are the Government’s answer to the problem, but we have been talking about those for more than five years. The Glasgow drug checking facility was delayed because of the snail’s pace at which the Government operates. It was approved by the Home Office in October 2025, so why the delay in bringing it into being?

We know that synthetic opioids evolve quickly, so does the minister think that drug checking facilities will be effective? She rightly says that the numbers are unacceptable, but what is she doing to prevent people from losing their lives due to the increased risk of synthetic opioids in Scotland?

No, it is not.

As all members in the chamber are aware, September is childhood cancer awareness month. I will start by recognising the progress that has been made on childhood cancers over the years. In 1975, when records began, childhood cancer five-year survival rates in the United Kingdom were below 40 per cent. Today, that number is 87 per cent, and, with optimism about what can be achieved in the future and with political will, improvements can still be made. I hope that there will be more than enough political will expressed in the chamber this evening to do just that.

I commend the work of Young Lives vs Cancer, the Teenage Cancer Trust and many other cancer charities and clinicians in their determination to improve services. I also recognise the contribution that the Government’s strategy, “Collaborative and Compassionate Cancer Care: cancer strategy for children and young people 2021–2026”, has made. The demands of childhood cancers are distinct from those of adult cancers. The strategy recognised the failings at the time and the inequality in care between health boards, leading to an inequality of outcomes. Driving forward a national strategy and national standards meant that everyone in Scotland was able to take advantage of the latest diagnostics and treatments, including specialist treatments offered from London and occasionally further afield in the US. I start, therefore, by congratulating the Government, but I also want to push it on when the next strategy will be published and what it will contain.

The centralisation of service provision has had benefits for outcomes, but it has also had drawbacks. Children and families now need to travel to facilities in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen—that puts unwelcome strain on family finances, and cancer in children does not discriminate. For some families, the average travel costs in the UK are £250 per month. Those costs are too much to bear, leading to the alarming statistic that one in 10 families with children receiving cancer treatment have missed appointments because they could not afford the travel costs. That figure is based on a UK average of 350 miles; in Scotland, it is 400 miles, so the cost is even greater.

Those from the least deprived backgrounds are able to ensure that their child has access to the best healthcare in the world, but for families in our most deprived communities, the means to access timely, high-quality care is not always forthcoming, because money may not be readily available.

We are told that one in three families cut back on food; one in five take on debt; and nearly one third fall behind on household bills. We cannot let money be a barrier to young people accessing cancer care. The young patients family fund is a reimbursement benefit—if people do not have the taxi fare to begin with, there is no help for them. All the cancer charities, including the Edinburgh Children’s Hospital Charity, are calling for cash-first options for families to receive young patients family fund support. That would remove barriers to ensure that everyone can access support, regardless of personal circumstances.

In addition, the young patients family fund is currently available only to families of children who are undergoing in-patient care; however, for childhood cancer treatments, chemotherapy and radiotherapy are most often given as out-patient procedures. The fund stops at 16, but the treatments for young people are the same until they are 25. I therefore urge the Minister for Mental Wellbeing, Public Health, Sport, Alcohol and Drugs to expand the fund to cover treatments for out-patients, and to extend the age limit.

Indy McBreen, from Irvine in North Ayrshire, was diagnosed with acute leukaemia in July 2023, when she was aged two. She received treatment at the Royal hospital for children in Glasgow, 40 miles from home. Indy’s dad has recounted their experiences, saying:

“We live around 40 miles from The Glasgow Royal Hospital for Children where Indy’s main treatment centre is and have attended there every week for the past two years, sometimes 3-4 times per week. As for the travel expenses, it’s definitely something that has been a problem, particularly during the early stages of treatment. It was less of an issue when Indy has been an in-patient because we have the Young Patients Family Fund in NHS Scotland which (mostly) covered travel and subsistence expenses while she was in hospital.”

However, when Indy had out-patient appointments on consecutive days, the family had to be supported by Young Lives vs Cancer to stay in Marion’s house, the charity’s accommodation in Glasgow. Most of the time, they were not eligible for support from the fund. The last thing that a parent wants going through their head when they are supporting their child who has cancer is whether or not they can afford a taxi. Parents should not have to ask themselves whether they will need to choose between eating today or getting their child to an appointment, and yet that is the reality for far too many.

The 2021 national strategy for cancer treatment for children did make improvements in cancer care, because it rightly started from a place where it openly and honestly accepted that there were problems. We are told that a new childhood cancer strategy is in the works from the Government. When it appears, it must again recognise existing problems openly and honestly, without pointing to what already exists but is not actually working. It must recognise that inequality of access to high-quality care by postcode is now also inequality by income, and that the existing young patients family fund model does not work for the most deprived households. That is the barrier to delivering world-class cancer diagnostics and treatment to the children who need it.

Of course, the clinical treatment of cancers in children is just one aspect of their care. Where the physical toll of battling cancer takes a front seat, the mental load can often be ignored. A new cancer strategy for children and young people should ensure that there is provision that is flexible enough to meet the complex and varied needs of children who are going through cancer treatment. An advantage of centralised cancer care is that auxiliary care and support can also be co-located. There is no excuse for that not to be delivered effectively, but that is something that families and third sector organisations say is still lacking. I therefore call on the Scottish Government to see that that will also be addressed in the new strategy.

In closing, I look forward to the publication of the new cancer strategy for children and young people—whenever it comes; I would appreciate comment from the minister on that—but it must include removing barriers to access to treatment for families and changing the criteria for accessing the young patients family fund.

18:04

Before I begin my questions, I put on record my condolences and those of the Scottish Labour Party on the death of former MSP Cathie Craigie. Cathie was a much-loved colleague. She was a woman of great determination and tenacity. She was the first woman to pass a member’s bill in this Parliament, protecting mortgage holders. As the daughter of a miner, she was a fierce campaigner for miners’ welfare and wellbeing. She was committed to our Labour movement, to the Parliament and to her constituents in Cumbernauld and Kilsyth. Our thoughts are with her family at this difficult time. [Applause.]

Presiding Officer, it is another week, another court case. The Scottish Information Commissioner, the man who is tasked with holding the Government to account, is challenging the Scottish National Party in court over its refusal to release vital information. He says that the SNP Government risks undermining the public’s right to access information and would relegate him to little more than a “supervisory role”.

The SNP Government stands accused of seeking the power to decide what information the public can see and what they cannot see. The public’s right to know is on the line, so I ask the First Minister what is more important—the right of Scots to know what their Government is up to or shielding himself, his London-based former leader and his party from scrutiny?