Trapped in hospital for a year. Why outrageous NHS scandal must be central issue in Holyrood election
One of the NHS’s biggest problems is that one in nine beds is occupied by someone who does not need to be there
In this election year, voters must insist the scandalous state of the National Health Service is a do-or-die issue for every party and every candidate. For it is only by ensuring that political careers depend upon the fate of the NHS that the bold, radical steps needed to save it will be taken.
If, instead, the electorate responds to long waiting times for treatment – and the unnecessary loss of life such delays cause – with a cynical shrug of the shoulders, the health service will never get the attention it so desperately needs.
For a decade and more, the problem of delayed discharges of patients from hospital, also known as ‘bed blocking’, has plagued the NHS despite many SNP promises to tackle it.
Staggering cost of delayed discharge
According to an Audit Scotland report published yesterday, one in every nine beds in Scottish healthcare settings is occupied by someone who does not need to be there but cannot return home, usually because of a lack of social care provision.
The report found this costs the NHS at least £440 million, although the true cost was “likely to be much higher”. Curiously, Scottish Labour’s health spokesperson Jackie Baillie said social care was estimated to be underfunded by nearly £500m, so proper funding might just pay for itself.
It would also free bed-blocked patients like Margaret MacGill, 62, a former nurse and social care worker, who has been stuck in hospital for more than a year after becoming paralysed from the waist down by a rare spinal condition. Now in a wheelchair, her house has been adapted with ramps, widened doors and an extension.
However, she remains in hospital because, as Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton said, “the staff she needs to drop by to help her” are not available. When he raised MacGill’s case at First Minister’s Questions, John Swinney replied that there was a “very active focus on meeting the social care challenge in the Highlands”.
However, he also said there was a problem with “the availability of carers”, especially in rural areas “where the working age population is not as large as we would want it to be”.
This sounds too much like a shrug of the shoulders, an excuse for the current situation to continue. ‘We can’t get the staff’ is just not good enough. As we have said before, public sector workforce planning is a dull but extremely important job that governments need to get right. If people aren’t applying for jobs, they need to find ways to attract them.
A massive queue across Scotland
In another report, published last month, Audit Scotland said the performance of the NHS in Scotland had “not improved in line with commitments” made by the Scottish Government despite an extra £3 billion of funding since 2019 and the recruitment of thousands more staff.
This suggests that the way the NHS is being managed is a major part of the problem. But it also offers the hope that better management could make a huge difference. And, ultimately, the people in overall charge are the politicians.
A massive queue has formed in modern-day Scotland in recent years. It is made up of Scots in hospital beds waiting for social care at home, of patients in A&E waiting for a bed in a ward, of people in ambulances stacked up outside hospitals waiting to get into A&E, and of others lying injured and in pain waiting hours for an ambulance. At any moment, any one of us could find ourselves joining it.
The only solution is a political solution. And only the power of our votes will force politicians to find it.
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