Opposition hypocrisy over A&E performance – enabled by BBC Scotland and the Daily Express

By stewartb

It’s over for another week!  Tuesday in Scotland is such a special day!

It’s the time when political hypocrisy flourishes, enabled and sustained by context- and perspective-free ‘journalism’. It’s the day in Scotland when the BBC and others in the mainstream media amplify cries of ‘shame’, ’crisis’ or similar from Tory, Lib Dem and Labour politicians It’s the day when there are demands for the head of a Scottish Government minister.

Why are Tuesdays so special: it’s the day when NHS Scotland releases the latest statistics on A&E waiting times performance! It’s like GERS publication day times 52!

True to form!

Perhaps the only ‘surprise’ in this latest Tuesday ritual was that a supposed ‘democratic socialist’ party – yes, that is how Labour in Scotland, led by Mr Sarwar and Dame Jackie, is still described on its website – was content to amplify, via Twitter, comment on NHS Scotland from the Daily Express. (Well, it’s not really a surprise nowadays is it?) On the day, the headline chosen for the BBC News website was presumably not ‘colourful’ enough for Labour’s purpose.

Previous TuS blog posts published on 11 July critique the BBC and Express coverage of the latest performance data. I’d like to draw attention to just one new line of attack attributed to opposition politicians viz. the time since the 95% target for 4 hour waits was last achieved in Scotland.

In the Daily Express we have this headline: ‘Humza Yousaf shamed as almost a million Scots forced to wait too long in A&E ‘chaos’ – the First Minister has presided over an NHS Scotland which has failed to meet its A&E targets for more than 1,000 days, since the Covid pandemic. (https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/humza-yousaf-shamed-almost-million-30438871)

The Express states: ‘And this poor performance was described as the typical type of service that Scots have come to expect from the nationalists.’ It seems to have been Lib Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton who was focusing on the ‘record 1,095 days since the Scottish Government last met its A&E target’.

Scottish Tory chairman Craig Hoy also joined in claiming ‘the buck stops with Humza Yousaf due to his “flimsy NHS Recovery plan” being “not worth the paper it was printed on.” He added: “The SNP last met their own A&E targets nearly three years ago and they have barely come close ever since to doing so.’

Keep this 1,095 days/three year statistic in mind.

Some facts

The last time 95% of A&E attendances in Scotland met the 4 hour target – i.e. the performance standard – was in week-ending 12 July 2020. (Recall that in the UK the Covid pandemic started around January 2020.) It was not uncommon in the years preceding July 2020 for the weekly national performance against the 4 hour standard to fall between 85% and 90%.

A target is just that – something to strive to achieve: make the target lower and it will be achieved more often, more easily.

Shifts in target setting for A&E in NHS England get little media attention: in December 2022 the UK government and NHS England agreed on an ‘intermediary threshold target’ of 76% for the achievement of 4 hour waits to be hit by March 2024, with further improvement expected in 2024/25.

Is failing to achieve 95% – and now striving for (just) 76% – not an indication of ‘chaos’, of ‘crisis’ in England’s NHS? Is it not an indication of a “flimsy NHS Recovery plan” that is “not worth the paper it was printed on”?  And will sub-76% performance in A&E in England NOT be called out by opposition politicians in Westminster and NOT be reported by the media as failure? Perhaps, to paraphrase the Express, this has become the typical type of service that the English have come to expect from the (British/English) nationalists in government!

Perspective

Given the focus this particular Tuesday on the time since NHS Scotland last met its 4 hour standard of 95%, it’s fortuitous for those of us who crave perspective to find this recent analysis of NHS England data from the authoritative health think tank, the Nuffield Trust:

Source: Nuffield Trust (5 July 2023) A&E waiting times: Analysing data on waiting times in A&E, we look at the commitment to a maximum four-hour wait. (https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/a-e-waiting-times )

Below is the telling graph: I’ve added the vertical red line to help identify when the 95% target for 4 hour waits was last achieved in England – it was around Q2 of the year 2012-13 i.e. around 10 years ago. And to help reveal the crucial comparison, I’ve added a vertical blue line to indicate when NHS Scotland last achieved its 95% performance target i.e. as opposition politicians have been pointing out, this was three years ago, during July 2020!

End Note

I’m grateful to the Daily Express and to opposition MSPs for helping to draw attention to this remarkable difference: 3 years since the 95% target was last met in Scotland and 10 years since last met in England, the former after Covid struck, the latter long, long before any pandemic!

And which is the ONLY government in the UK with absolute control over the level of resourcing it can provide to the NHS for which it is responsible? And which is the ONLY government in the UK – with ALL the levers of fiscal, monetary and labour market/migration powers at its disposal – who’s allocation of resources to the NHS influences the resources that are available to be allocated to the NHS in Scotland, NI and Wales?

Which government neglected the NHS for ten years – long before the Covid pandemic – whilst the performance of the A&E for which it is responsible plummeted?