Welcome Neil Gray to your rather grim and overflowing in-tray - Jackie Baillie

After the shameful resignation, comes the inevitable talk of reform.

With Michael Matheson out the door with his reputation in tatters the new health secretary Neil Gray has vowed to “reform” and to “improve”.

Well, I do welcome Neil Gray to his post but talk is cheap, certainly cheaper than the iPad bill Michael Matheson attempted to fob off on the taxpayer without a scintilla of shame.

The truth facing Mr Gray is that the SNP has presided over a decade and half of decline in our NHS with no marked reform or change.

Scottish Health Secretary Neil Gray during a visit to Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow this week. PIC: Jane Barlow/PA Wire

The Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) report out last week, a kind of welcome card for Neil Gray, laid out the situation in bald figures.

Analysing the figures for Spring 2023, it detailed how the Scottish NHS handled eight per cent fewer emergency admissions, day patients and outpatient appointments than before the pandemic. There were also 21 per cent fewer elective inpatient admissions, all despite higher funding and more staff than in the year before the pandemic.

This report should be a wake up call for Neil Gray, as the state of the NHS should have been to Michael Matheson and before him Humza Yousaf. A succession of SNP health secretaries failed upwards while the NHS declined on their watch.

The IFS weather report is only part of the bulging in-tray left for Mr Gray by the iPad king. Almost one in six people in Scotland are on waiting lists from the NHS. That is 830,000 people and it is an extraordinary and shocking number.

We're not doing enough to pull that back. In fact, it is getting worse not better. If you look in particular at cancer waiting times, where we have not met the 31 or 62 day targets for treatment, the situation is frightening.

Everybody knows that the sooner you detect cancer, then the more likely you are to get a better outcome. Now people are presenting at much later stages.

The list goes and we are seeing people regularly wait over 12 hours at Accident & Emergency when there is a need to be seen.

The new health secretary appears determined to press on with the National Care Service which is a flawed piece of legislation at a time when packages for social care are fraying and social care staff are really struggling.

All these unresolved issues and more are sitting in Neil Gray’s in-tray. He can talk about reform, he can talk about improvement but the evidence that people see with their own eyes is that after years of the SNP it has delivered none of that.

What we hear and what we know is that people want change, in the NHS and in the government. That change is the Labour party and this weekend at our Scottish conference and in the months to come we’ll outline how we modernise the NHS, drive down waiting lists and empower clinicians to deliver for patients.

Jackie Baillie, MSP for Dumbarton, is the Scottish Labour spokesperson on health