Humza Yousaf warned NHS Scotland pledge 'not worth the paper its written on' unless he tackles workforce problems

The Scottish Government will provide an extra £100 million a year over the next three years to tackle hospital waiting lists

Humza Yousaf’s pledge to provide an extra £300 million for NHS Scotland to tackle hospital waiting lists “is not worth the paper it’s written on” unless workforce planning “is right at its heart”, a doctors’ union has warned.

The latest Public Health Scotland figures show there were 667,746 patients on hospital waiting lists in June - up from almost 625,000 in February.

To tackle this, Mr Yousaf has found an additional £100m a year, to be spent over three years, from his Government’s budget. However, the pledge is only expected to reduce waiting lists by an estimated 100,000 patients by 2026 – less than one sixth of the existing backlog.

Humza Yousaf addressed the SNP conference for the first time as party leader, where he pledged an extra £300 million for the NHS to cut waiting lists. (Photo by Peter Summers/Getty Images)

Mr Yousaf told SNP conference: “This additional £300m investment will allow us to maximise capacity, build greater resilience into the system and deliver year-on-year reductions in the number of patients who have waited too long.”

But Dr Iain Kennedy, chair of BMA Scotland, said extra investment “is not merely welcome, but indeed desperately needed” due to Scottish Government spending cuts.

“What is crucial – and isn’t clear at this stage – is how the money will be allocated to ensure it delivers sustainable improvements across the whole health and care system and isn’t simply an eye-catching soundbite designed to generate headlines,” he said.

“The best way to deliver change that benefits Scotland's patients in the long term is to invest in health and care workers and finally address the medical workforce crisis we face in NHS Scotland by recruiting and even more crucially retaining the doctors we need to meet the overwhelming and unmet demand.

“Any initiative to tackle waiting lists is simply not worth the paper it is written on if whole system workforce planning is not right at its heart. And it's not just patients waiting for operations, but also those waiting for investigations and clinic appointments that need to be the focus.

“We are not clear how the additional funding is going to help though if healthcare workers are already at capacity, so we need to hear that from the Government in short order.

“With winter approaching, and elective operation cancellations likely to rise to deal with the immediate emergency pressures, we also need to make sure that we are investing heavily in social care. This is best for patients and will free up capacity in hospitals.”

The Scottish Government says it intends to present its draft budget for 2024/25 to the Scottish Parliament in December.

Eileen McKenna, associate director of the Royal College of Nursing Scotland, said that to cut NHS waiting lists, “the First Minister must first cut the number of nursing vacancies across Scotland’s health and care services”.

“Too many experienced nursing staff are leaving, worn down by the years of understaffing and underinvestment,” she said. “And too few are choosing to study our safety critical profession.

“The Scottish Government must deliver on its commitments to reform the Agenda for Change pay system and to ensure the Nursing and Midwifery Taskforce delivers a robust and funded action plan to support retention, increase the numbers studying nursing and improve the workplace culture and wellbeing of health and care staff.”

The concerns were raised as Scottish Labour warned “lives are on the line” due to the failure to tackle long waits in accident and emergency (A&E).

Labour issued the warning as the latest weekly figures showed performance against the four-hour, A&E target remained largely unchanged, with a third of patients waiting longer than this to be either admitted, transferred or discharged.

Health secretary Michael Matheson accepted that “A&E peformance is not where it needs to be”, adding the problem of delayed discharges from hospital was a “major factor” in this.