Sick and injured patients have to queue for hours to see an emergency doctor. Elderly folk are stranded on trolleys in corridors, waiting, it seems, an eternity for a hospital bed.

A seasonal outbreak of flu and the ever-lurking Covid-19 have only added to the pressure. Little wonder senior medical figures have said they have never been more concerned about the standards of acute care.

Humza Yousaf, our hapless Health Secretary, looks on bewildered, dodging calls on him to resign for his ineffectual management of our NHS.

Health Secretary Humza Yousaf (Photo by Fraser Bremner - Pool/Getty Images)

“Every single option nationally is being considered because of the scale of the pressure we’re under,” he said, after meeting the Royal College of Emergency Medicine a few days ago.

But perhaps he is looking for the answer in the wrong place, because the current crisis is not a health service catastrophe, it is a social care disaster.

There is no doubt that the national health service, conceived in the years after the Second World War, needs urgent reform, but that is for another day, and frankly for a Health Secretary with more imagination and courage than MR Yousaf.

What the Scottish Government needs to focus on for the next period is fixing social care. Our A&E wards cannot cope because there are too many elderly people trapped in hospital beds with no-one to look after them at home or no care home places for them.

There may be a network of 31 health and social care partnerships across Scotland, which, like Edinburgh’s, promise to transform social care by delivering the right care in the right place at the right time. But they are failing.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that medical professionals look down on their social work colleagues, a view mirrored by the public who view nurses as angels, while social care staff are poorly paid and often treated as skivvies. Little wonder there are severe staff shortages in the sector.

There is not enough money in the system, with taxpayers reluctant to contemplate paying more for services they hope never to use. And the Scottish Government’s much vaunted plans for a National Care Service by 2026 have been greeted with scepticism.

Cosla, the body that represents Scotland’s councils – which are largely responsible for social care – has called on the government to pause their plans for reform and focus instead on immediate improvements.

And last January, Audit Scotland – the independent watchdog for public spending – published a report warning of an impending crisis in social care.

At the time, Stephen Boyle, the Auditor General for Scotland, said: ”We cannot wait another five years until the planned National Care Service is in place.

"Action must happen now, and at speed, by the Scottish Government. There must be clear timescales for delivery, demonstrating that lessons have been learnt from previous reforms of health and social care services.”

No action happened. Lessons were not learned. Instead of focusing its energy and resources on fixing the teetering social care system, the Scottish government ploughed on with its uncosted plans for a national care service.

The result is the catastrophe we face today. A social care crisis. Not an NHS one.

The health crisis lies in dithering and deafness over social care reforms - Susan Dalgety