Hospital waiting times in Scotland: My three-point plan to tackle this growing crisis – Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP

Before the pandemic, Nicola Sturgeon’s government was breaking the law many hundreds of times a day.

The Covid crisis has made the target for patients to receive treatment within 12 weeks of referral by a clinician even more difficult than it was in the past (Picture: Andrew O'Brien)

In fact, they broke this particular law 83,000 times in the year preceding the coronavirus emergency, alone. The law I’m talking about is the Patients Rights Act of 2011 which covers the legally binding commitment by the SNP government to have Scottish patients receive treatment within 12 weeks of referral by a clinician. The so-called “treatment time guarantee”.

Hospital waiting times were a disaster in Scotland long before Covid. I’ve lost count of the number of constituents who would visit my surgery, clutching a letter cheerfully advising them of their right to expect a three-month turnaround on the medical intervention they needed, only to find out that they were already approaching week 40 or 50 in that wait. Things were bad, but lockdown has turbo-charged the waiting-times crisis in this country.

In the past four months, 71,000 operations were added to the surgical backlog as parts of our NHS remained closed. Diagnostic screening has been hit hard too, with some 100,000 patients missing out on investigations which may have caught a problem early. The pent-up demand that’s coming down the tracks in our NHS is gargantuan.

It’s so easy for me to point all this out and to moan about it, but I’m in politics to fix things. So today, in this column, I’m launching a three-point plan that could help in the coming waiting times crisis:

1: Be straight with people and treat them like grown-ups: The law demands that people receive that letter advising them that they’ll be seen in 12 weeks, even if there isn’t a hope in hell that’s going to happen. That needs to stop. People know there is a backlog, they just want to know how long they’ll have to wait. We need to stop the false hope offered by the 12-week letters and give people a realistic assessment of when they’ll get seen. 2: Let people see where they are in the queue: Those letters are often all people have to go on until they get tired and phone the hospital. If we introduced an online portal where you could enter your patient number and see where you are in the queue, you could make plans around that, take your life off hold for a bit and perhaps even decide (if you have the resources) to go private. 3: Make it someone’s responsibility: I’ve been banging on about the SNP’s transgression of the guarantee since I first got to Parliament. It must be the most broken law in Scottish history – but nobody carries the can. The Health Secretary has too much on her plate to devote a needle-sharp focus on this problem so we need a Minister for Waiting Times, whose job it is to sort this and who will be held accountable if things don’t improve.

The recent SNP conference was peppered with discussion around the one thing that’s going to get in the way of all of this when it comes to government attention. It’s time their ministers ditched the endless skirmishes around independence and focussed on the real problems we face.

After all, we’ve waited long enough.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MSP for Edinburgh Western

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