Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP government has come under concerted cross-party attack after it emerged that Scottish hospitals had missed several key A&E waiting times and bed blocking targets.
Weekly figures for accident and emergency waiting times – published for the first time on Tuesday after ministers gave way to demands to release weekly data – showed that only 87% of patients were seen within four hours, against an interim target of 95%, with 187 people stuck in A&E for over 12 hours.
In Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC), where some of the worst crises have emerged, the latest weekly data showed only 76% to 78% of patients were seen within four hours. At Scotland’s main A&E hospitals, the performance was worse than at comparable sites in England.
Shona Robison, the Scottish health minister, blamed the results in part on winter flu outbreaks, and disclosed that special advisers were now being sent to the Western General hospital in Glasgow to help bring A&E delays under control.
While the number of delayed discharges had fallen in January, the latest quarterly data showed it had jumped between October to December last year with 168,500 bed days lost through delayed discharges – 33,000 more days lost than in the same period in 2003. More than 200 patients spent more than six weeks too long in hospital.
Opposition parties at Holyrood were scathing, accusing Scottish ministers of “taking their eye off the ball”. The Liberal Democrats said the data showed the number of people waiting over eight hours for A&E treatment had doubled to 3,215.
Jenny Marra, Scottish Labour’s health spokeswoman, said the January figures were the worst since 2008, with three times as many people waiting for more than 12 hours in A&E than the previous month.
“Today’s figures show that A&E is in crisis under the SNP,” Marra said. “The SNP government in Edinburgh is letting down patients across Scotland, but they are also letting down NHS staff who have dedicated their careers to saving lives and caring for others. They are not getting the support they need from the SNP. Our NHS deserves so much better than this.”
Robison admitted the bed blocking figures were unacceptable, but she insisted the Scottish targets were the most challenging in the UK. “More clearly needs to be done to tackle the issues facing our NHS,” she said.
Robison said: “Today’s A&E waiting time figures are on a par with those in NHS England, and far exceed those in NHS Wales and Northern Ireland. However, they do not meet the demanding, world-leading targets we have set and the standards that patients should rightly expect.
“We are determined to improve performance through a whole system approach, improving patient flow throughout their journey from admission to discharge.”
The quality of NHS services in Scotland has become a key general election battleground and is central to Labour’s attempts to overturn a hefty SNP lead in the polls after it became a significant issue at last September’s independence referendum.
The yes vote was boosted among former Labour voters by the SNP’s successful attacks on NHS privatisation policy in England and attacks by Sturgeon on the Welsh Labour government’s performance on NHS targets. The SNP insisted independence would protect the NHS.
But opposition parties said the latest Scottish data showed that Sturgeon’s government had failed to deliver on its own promises, after expert evidence had shown the NHS in Scotland was being underfunded compared to other parts of the UK.
Jim Hume, the Scottish Lib Dems health spokesman, said: “The crisis facing A&E units couldn’t be more apparent. Now NHS staff and patients need to know what the SNP is going to do to fix it.”
Robison said the government had already committed £100m to help NHS boards and councils tackle bed blocking, which would in turn relieve pressure on A&E departments, as well as spending another £50m on an unscheduled care action plan to increase staffing.
Another £31.5m was being given to NHSGGC to improve frontline services and further figures released on Tuesday showed that overall NHS staffing levels had hit record levels, with more than 137,500 full-time posts, including 2,000 more nurses employed since 2007.
But Theresa Fyffe, the Royal College of Nursing Scotland director, said the headline staffing increases masked other problems in frontline numbers, where nurses felt under greater stress and pressure.
“While it’s good news that the number of nurses working in our NHS is increasing, we’re deeply concerned that the general trend on vacancy rates for nursing is worsening,” Fyffe said. “It’s not surprising that our members are increasingly reporting that they don’t think there are enough staff in post to deliver good quality patient care.”
