On the back of an interview this morning with the Health Secretary, where he acknowledged pressure on NHS Scotland, Reporting Scotland headlined and extended the story to paint a worrying picture for those in need of hospital care or those around them.
A&E waiting times are once more paraded, in the complete absence of reference to the triage system which guarantees that those at serious risk are seen very quickly and only those who are not at risk need wait a bit longer.
BBC Scotland news is a public service broadcaster, paid for by its audience through taxation and expected to provide it with the timely and accurate information it needs to help it, especially the more vulnerable members, cope with the risks life unavoidably presents.
What useful information has this broadcast offered? The NHS is under pressure so think twice about attending?
That might be useful if, and only if, you know you’re a bit of a hypochondriac or if you, on reflection might think ‘this can wait till I speak to my GP tomorrow‘ but what if you don’t know why you have a sharp pain in your chest or keep getting dizzy and falling over, or what if you’re very old and confused, or what if you have a mental health problem making it hard for you to judge whether something is serious or not?
You see the risk? Someone who really should go, might not, because they’re not sure or they don’t want to make a fuss. The old and vulnerable often think that way and they’re the very sort of folk who rely on TV to keep them informed.
The pet expert above, parrots the same under-pressure, delays rhetoric with no reminder that if you are worried you should attend.
Nobody mentions, of course:
‘The number of planned operations carried out in August was the largest monthly total since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic‘
https://scottishgov-newsroom.prgloo.com/news/number-of-hospital-operations-increases
or this:
In Westminster’s Health Committee, Dr Pelle Gustafson, CMO at Swedish Patient Insurer, responded with “Scotland”, when he was asked which country he would hold at the very top pillar with regards to patient safety. Dr Gustfason said: “If you take all preventative work in regard to patient safety, I would say Scotland, I am personally very impressed with Scotland. I think in Scotland you have a long tradition of working, you have a development in the right direction and you also have a system which is fairly equal all over the place. You have improvement activities going on. So I am very impressed by Scotland”. He added that the UK could learn a lot from the Nordic countries in this area but also that the Nordic countries could learn a lot from Scotland.
https://twitter.com/Dr_PhilippaW/status/1480995875937996801
Has anyone at BBC Scotland done the risk assessment on this?
Talking-up Scotland 
BBC operating in Scotland would be delighted to report serious problems in the SNHS and quite frankly they don’t care one single bit about the welfrae of the people of Scotland. Their job as we know is to do down and undermine the Scottish government, and attempt to paint a picture of a collapsing health service in Scotland, a lie of course. We all know that the ScotGov are mitigating cuts by the EngGov, to our services including the SNHS. How long the Scotgovs’ mitigating Tory cuts can continue, without full fiscal and welfare powers etc, probably not for long.
I discovered via WordPress, a site about the NHS in England, it’s not a good situation to say the very least. Here is the link, and it’s quite terrifying what is going there. I won’t share specfic posts not sure that’s allowed, but have a deco, tip of the iceberg I think, sigh.
https://calderdaleandkirklees999callforthenhs.wordpress.com/
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‘Has anyone at BBC Scotland done the risk assessment on this?’
Has anyone at BBC Scotland expended any effort to understand how the experienced, caring, mission-driven professionals in NHS Scotland’s emergency services actually operate the services from patients calling 999 or taking themselves to A&E to time to ‘triage’; then to diagnosis; to immediate, emergency treatment; and then to admission, transfer or discharge?
Do they have any conception of – indeed any interest in – the concept of ‘triage’ and its intrinsic risk assessment and prioritisation of patient treatment based on urgency of need? Do they have any conception of elapse times between steps in the processing of one, or perhaps multiple and necessarily serial, diagnostic tests and their interpretation? One could go on!
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The only risk assessment that concerns BBC Scotland is the risk to their beloved Union of yet another election victory for the SNP.
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Aye, “What useful information has this broadcast offered? ” indeed…
It is the nature of the beast of A&E that staff have no way of predicting who comes through the doors – An RTA, a booze/drugs party gone horribly wrong, a mishandled kitchen knife resulting in a gash, a slip which caused dislocation – It is an environment where priorities can and do change in minutes, the last thing on their mind is how performance stats will look next week, and quite rightly so.
Hospital management and staff are the only people who understand the stats and what caused them, and frankly Yousaf has no more a clue than Sarwar or Lisa Summers, yet the latter labels it a political scandal which then is amplified in the media with cameos from Disaster Gulhane or Tsunami Baillie.
eg – I recently heard Sarwar in Holyrood wail and moan about patients “waiting” in A&E 24 or 48 hours, but his deliberate stripping of context as to what “waiting” actually meant implied they were still “waiting” to be triaged rather than being monitored.
That evening it was regurgitated by Mis-Reporting Scotland, still absent context, as if sick and injured had spent 2 days in the A&E car park without food and water waiting on a nurse to take their name.
I imagine NHS staff are pig sick of this endless political media drivel, and with so many Scots connected in some way or other to the NHS, the public must be equally sick if it.
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