Minister thanks NHS staff for tackling Scotland's hospital waiting lists

Published on Thursday 2 April 2009 12:03

THE Health Secretary today offered her personal thanks to the NHS for its work to tackle waiting times.

Nicola Sturgeon told MSPs that the service had met national targets and was making progress to future goals.

She said: "I want to give a personal thank you to everyone who works in the NHS, as we know delivering swift high quality care is a team effort, involving clinical and support staff and they all deserve great credit."

The comments came as it emerged the ambulance service had beaten a key emergency response target for the first time.

The service beat its target to reach 75% of life-threatening 999 call-outs within eight minutes, achieving 77% last month.

MSPs applauded the success during a Government-led debate on hospital waiting times.

Ms Sturgeon welcomed moves by the previous Labour-Liberal Democrat administration to improve the NHS.

The SNP administration has already announced that it wants the NHS to reach a maximum waiting time of 18 weeks by 2011.

Ms Sturgeon said: "All in all, the last two years have seen the best ever overall performance on waiting times recorded by the NHS.

"This is impressive in and of itself, but in my view it is all the more impressive when we consider that hidden waiting lists have also been abolished in that period.

"We now have a situation where many thousands of patients, patients previously excluded from waiting times standards, now have access to health care with the shortest waiting times that this country has ever experienced."

Labour health spokeswoman Cathy Jamieson welcomed the progress on waiting times, which she compared with the situation in the 1990s.

Under the last UK Tory Government, the NHS needed intensive care, she told MSPs.

Ms Jamieson added: "In the 1990s it wasn't uncommon for people to wait two years or more for operations or hospital treatment and the reality was that many people did not survive their time on that waiting list."

She said that setting targets was the right thing to do, despite some concern that waiting times should be at the discretion of doctors to protect those in greatest need.

"Opportunities are there to extend the waiting times guarantee to more areas of healthcare to make sure that the capacity we're building in the NHS is fully utilised for the benefit of patients," she said.

"Patients also want a quality service and they will judge the success of the NHS on their whole experience and not just on the waiting times."