Why 'national tragedy' of deadly hours-long waits in A&E should be Scotland's top election issue
Hundreds of people are dying every year because of long waits for emergency treatment
According to the Scottish Government, 95 per cent of patients arriving at Accident and Emergency departments should be seen and dealt with in four hours. Some might think this is a long time to deal with what could be an “emergency” and they’d be right.
However, such is the state of the NHS, achieving this target would represent an extraordinary turnaround. For the latest figures show that, in the week ending February 2, just 61.9 per cent of patients were seen and either admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours – worse than the previous week’s performance of 62.5 per cent.
The news prompted cross-party condemnation. Scottish Labour health spokesperson Jackie Baillie pointed out that the four-hour target had not been met since July 2020, lambasting “almost six years of abject failure” under the SNP. Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said it was “ridiculous that staff have been left to deal with these extreme pressures for years on end”. We couldn’t agree more.
And, warning that the NHS was now “teetering on the brink after decades of SNP mismanagement”, Scottish Conservative health spokesperson Dr Sandesh Gulhane made the most telling point of all: “We know this leads to people dying before their time.”
‘These are people. Mums, dads, brothers, sisters...’
In September last year, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimated there were 818 excess deaths related to A&E waits of 12 hours or longer in what the college’s vice-president, Dr Fiona Hunter, described as a “national tragedy”.
“Behind this statistic are stories of heartbreak. Because these are people. Mums, dads, brothers, sisters, grandparents – their deaths shattering the lives of families and friends,” she added.
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While the latest figures did show a modest fall in utterly unacceptable 12-hour waits, 2,059 people still endured that misery in the week ending February 1. One wonders whether anyone who died while waiting would have been recorded in that figure.
This is simply not good enough and Scotland must demand better. So when politicians ask for your vote, you need to let them know how strongly you feel. If we respond to this ongoing “national tragedy” with a shrug of our shoulders, it will only get worse.
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