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It is also a reflection of how complex cardiology services are, because a lot of cardiology patients are also treated in other wards—general medicine and geriatric medicine, for example—so figures are difficult to quantify.
I want to go back to general practice. The Scottish graduate entry medicine programme—ScotGEM—has been really successful for Dumfries and Galloway with regard to retention.
Buvidal is, or should be, available all over Scotland. The Scottish Medicines Consortium has assessed it and has made recommendations about where and how it should be used.
Since then, we have seen waiting times go through the roof, a medicine shortage that means that people with ADHD cannot get that vital lifeline, and school refusals of astronomical proportions.
Another large part of those consequentials is for health spending and we made a commitment to pass health consequentials on to our health service because of the pressures on it for various reasons including health inflation, the cost of medicines and energy, and other financial challenges.
That involves working with clinical and operational management leads from all health boards who come together to discuss specialities, such as respiratory medicine and cardiology. Workforce opportunities might be identified as part of that work.
The reason why that is serious is that the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has calculated that there will be an excess death for every one in 72 patients who spend between eight and 12 hours in an emergency department.
We see some of the longest waiting times in the diagnostic arena, where there is an average wait of 63 days for out-patient neurosurgery, 70 days for respiratory medicine and oral surgery, and 98 days for neurology patients.