Though a long-serving health correspondent, the Herald’s Helen McArdle makes some basic errors or maybe she’s trying to fool us?
First this:
RECORD numbers of patients spent more than eight hours in A&E departments in the latest week, in what has been described as a “deadly portent of the coming winter”.
Clinicians warned of “very real” harm coming to patients and staff as a result of the deteriorating situation, as separate data published today reveals spiralling mental health-related absences among emergency workers, including ambulance staff and A&E medics.
The latest figures on A&E performance shows that a record 3,553 people spent over eight hours waiting to be seen, treated and subsequently admitted, transferred or discharged in the week ending October 9.
The roughly 13% of patients who wait over 8 hours or the 5% who wait over 12, have first been triaged, often within minutes, to ensure they are not at serious, life-threatening risk, so that those who are, can be treated quickly. It’s simple. The ‘clinicians’ above know this but have an agenda.
Second, this:
The main cause of A&E logjams are a lack of available beds in hospital, due to factors such as delayed discharge and staff shortages.
Scotland has a significantly higher supply of beds, nurses and doctors than other parts of the UK and their media are not telling this story. Staffing is at a record level. It’s a scare. It’s political.
Talking-up Scotland / Scottish media fact checking is like shooting fish in a barrel 
The ‘Dead cat’ strategy that Unionists and their media chums use (quite effectively it must be said at least for the unwashed) when trying to divert attention from the shenaningans in Tory run England and the disgraced National Health Service in darkest Kent. Very sad but typical.
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“It’s a scare. It’s political.”. Yes, the Herald piece is all of that, it’s also desperate attention seeking guff.
The days when railway carriages were full of pipe smoking commuters to Glasgow with the large folding wallpaper size Glasgow Herald newspapers are long gone and never coming back. Sadly, it also seems, that the days when the Herald had proper journalists who could be trusted to do some research with context, are also long gone.
Now if they could only relaunch as the “Penny Dreadful”, they could be onto a winner.
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Slightly OT – The same strategy of misrepresenting what is happening in the NHS was deployed by Tory Leader Andrew RT Davies in the Senedd to attack Mark Drakeford
– The normally calm and measured Drakeford became so incensed by the hypocrisy of and continued barracking by Davies that he finally lost his temper catching everyone by total surprise, but the fallout from it was priceless.
Naturally this unusual occurrence spread rapidly across Welsh media, but since they not do propaganda McArdle style journalism, they simply report the facts – The public’s response was outright condemnation of Davies and support for Drakeford – The tactic could not have more spectacularly gone wrong for the Welsh Tories had they tried.
Perhaps a transfusion from a Welsh blood-bank could inject some honesty back into Scottish journalism…
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