Dr Iain Kennedy, chair of BMA Scotland
Enthusiastic Unionist and admirer of Sandesh Gulhane MP (Con) returns with another dodgy survey as part of a wider attempt to undermine the SNP.
The facts, not mentioned:
First, staffing:
NHS Scotland has 181 000 staff, 1 for every 30 members of the population of 5.44 million.
NHS England has 1.4 million staff, 1 for every 40 members of the population of 56 million.
NHS Wales has 90 000 million staff, 1 for every 35 members of the population of 3.14 million.
Sources:
Almost without exception, across Scotland, there are far more GPs per head of population and especially so in BMA Scotland’s ‘crisis-ridden’ rural parts. Look at rural Wales:
Second, waiting times:
Reading today Sunak ‘highly unlikely’ to meet promise to cut NHS waiting lists, warn health leaders and predictions that England’s waiting list will soar to 8 million next year, from the 7.6 million in the above graphs, I had a wee look around and found that in an August 2023 Guardian article I’d missed and ‘our’ media had ignored.
In that report we see also:
“There are many differences across the devolved nations which might be relevant here, notably an older population in Scotland and Wales with more deprivation; higher nurse staffing and higher spending in both Scotland and Wales; and more doctors in Scotland,” they [Nuffield Trust] said.
So, against the odds, with an older more deprived population, NHS Scotland still performs best.
Finally, for when Jackie Baillie accuses the Scottish Government of not spending as much on the NHS, this:
Health expenditure in the United Kingdom in 2021/22 (of which NHS spend is the lion’s share) was highest in Scotland at £3,490 per person and lowest in England at £3,192 per capita.
And, remember this:
NHS bosses are using misleading figures to hide dangerously poor performance by A&E units in England against the four-hour treatment target, emergency department doctors claim.
Some A&Es treat and admit, transfer or discharge as few as one in three patients within four hours, although the NHS constitution says they should deal with 95% of arrivals within that timeframe. How well or poorly A&Es are doing in meeting the 95% target is not in the public domain because the data that NHS England publishes is for NHS trusts overall, not individual hospitals.
That means official figures are an aggregate of performance at sometimes two A&Es run by the same trust or include data for any walk-in centres, minor injuries units or urgent treatment centres that a trust also operates. Forty-eight trusts have two A&Es and many also run at least one of the latter.https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/28/misleading-ae-figures-in-england-hiding-poor-performance
So, just how much faster are Scotland’s full A&E departments, then? Might that 13.8% be 30% or 50%? It’d take more IQ and time than I have to answer that but, once more, NHS England, saturated in dishonest managerialism, is revealed to be cheating.
Previously, we’ve seen them restarting the clocks well after A&E admissions, not counting hospital-acquired Covid infections at all, chucking millions at private hospitals to reduce the non-life-threatening longer waits just for press releases and planning to reduce the range of cancer targets.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
What’s with South Lanarkshire?
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Lisa Summers is on her way there to dig out BAD NEWS for Reporting Scotland.
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Reporting Scotland will present the staffing data as an example of ‘the union dividend’ and why we are Better Together. If Scotland became independent taxes would be so high all doctors and nurses would leave. ……. And, I hope Her Dameness the Jaikie of Baillie would say, “An Ah’m away tae, Keir hus said thurr’s a place fur me in the Lords alang with Lord fffffoulkes-Sake .
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Aye, https://archive.ph/WETI8 slotted into the #2 spot on bbc.com/news/uk-scotland page…
It must be the doctor’s strike in NHS England that James was ordered to hide, hence recycling this twaddle…
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It is ironic to read about a BMA chairperson berating the Scottish Government about staffing levels and budgets for NHS Scotland on the day when the BBC’s Nick Triggle writes this about NHS England in the BBC News website’s ‘health’ (not in its main ‘England’ or ‘politics’ section note!):
‘Overall more than 1.2 million appointments have been affected since strikes began in the NHS a year ago.
‘Next week junior doctors will take part in a six-day walkout – the longest in the history of the NHS. It begins on 3 January and comes after talks between the British Medical Association (BMA) and government broke down, earlier this month.’
I see the Scotsman is covering the BMA Scotland comments under this headline: ‘Unsafe’ NHS ‘like working in a war zone’, claim health leaders’. The ‘war zone’ claim we’re told later in the same piece is actually from a remark made by just ONE BMA member responding to a survey.
I suggest this ONE individual needs to reflect: (i) on what the state of the NHS in Scotland would have been without the interventions of the Scottish Government in the BMA’s industrial disputes; and more deeply (ii) on what medics and others in actual war zones are experiencing this very day.
On the BMA Scotland survey, anyone know if it is available for inspection? The BBC News website’s coverage of its findings include this odd line: ‘Of the 610 respondents to a BMA survey only 1% said they felt their department was staffed beyond safe levels.’ What does ‘beyond safe’ mean – is a ‘safe level’ not sufficient? How many of the survey questions are framed ‘oddly’?
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…and note the flitting between BMA, BMA Scotland, BMA survey… For where was this ‘BMA survey’ conducted and how ?
Innuendo is doing all the heavy lifting here…
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Like working in a war zone ????
Gaza and Ukraine are war zones. Is this eejit comparing QEUH or GlasgowRoyal Infirmary to these areas. Is Raigmore Hospital in Inverness after a shinty match like these places?
The man is a liar.
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Iain Kennedy of the Scottish BMA is willingly wheeled out every time NHS England is in the news , it is so he can berate the SNHS in order to make it seem just as bad as England , I have never once heard him praise the Scottish government for avoiding strikes with good pay offers for doctors , a doctor who puts politics before health !
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“I have never once heard him praise the Scottish government for avoiding strikes with good pay offers for doctors , a doctor who puts politics before health”
– Kennedy made the mistake before of crowing how he was promoting the BMA via BBC Scotland by putting SG down, it put a lot of medics backs up over an individual abusing their trust to play politics – is not what they’re about, and never has been.
Kennedy will be gone soon enough, and become a replacement Prof Pennington for BBC Scorchedland to wheel out without the set disintegrating from the fumes, for a while…..
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Mr Kennedy ( BMA ) is also noted for his role as The Boy Who Cried Wolf !
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‘The facts, not mentioned’ – how would the leadership of the Labour Party in Scotland explain the ‘facts’ set out below? Perhaps they never will, preferring to join BBC Scotland and most of the mainstream media which supposedly ‘serves’ Scotland in simply ignoring them – and by this means help ensure that many voters in Scotland are kept ill-informed.
From the Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s (RCEM) press statement (issued 21 December) on the latest (November 2023) A&E waiting times performance by NHS Wales’: Thousands of Welsh patients still facing excess and unacceptable A&E waits’
Here we learn that:
– 13.8% of patients were delayed by 12-hours or more at a major A&Es (equal to 8,558 patients)
– 22.6% of patients were delayed eight hours or more at a major emergency department (14,040 patients)
– 59.1% of patients in major A&Es were admitted, transferred, or discharged within four hours from arrival.
Notably, the RCEM adds: ‘The latest data has been released with the Welsh Government’s ‘Breach Exemption’ policy applied. This is despite it publishing data without the policy applied last month confirming RCEM’S ANALYSIS WHICH REVEALED THAT THE WAITING TIMES OF THOUSANDS OF PATIENTS WERE BEING MISREPRESENTED IN DATA was correct.’ (my emphasis)
Meanwhile in NHS Scotland, across the period from w/e 5 November to w/e 3 December, in the ‘main’ emergency departments – based on weekly releases of statistics – the four standard was achieved for between 60.8% and 64.9% of patients.
It is in longer waits that the contrast in performance is most marked. In NHS Scotland:
– the number of patients delayed for over 8 hours = 16,260 (ie. 13.2 % of attendances) – recall, the NHS Wales is 22.6%
– the number of patients delayed for over 12 hours = 7,147 (i.e. 5.8% of attendances) – the NHS Wales figure is 13.8%.
In this context, these are HUGE differences! So there are reasonable questions for the Labour leadership in Scotland to answer:
– why these differences and on this scale?
– how is such relatively very much poorer performance possible under a Labour government?
– during months and years of Labour’s negativity towards NHS Scotland and the Scottish Government, what are the ‘solutions’, the ‘fixes’ for NHS Scotland that the Party’s leadership in Scotland have devised that (apparently) it’s been keeping secret from the Labour government in Wales all this time?
Of course one could replicate such comparisons AND questions for Tories in Scotland.
(NHS Scotland figures from the NHS Performs website)
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Ach!!! None of the matters…..as soon enough Scottish NHS will be privatised under
Starmer and Kennedy will be out of a job and das BBC can tell us Scots how much
better we are under Herr Fuhrer’s dictatorship and we will all be glad that we didn’t
vote for those damn nasty nationalists the SNP and what did they ever do for
Scotland anyway and we will all live happily ever after under our safe blanket of
England and all it’s benefits and doff our caps when our masters pass by while
they holiday in up market private resorts in the best areas of Scotland well away
from the private nuclear plants built next to all of our crumbling cities while we
work our three day week with a few hours a day of electricity to enable us to cook
a pot of porridge and get our tartan baffies warm while we heat a kettle of water
to get a quick wash at the sink and we can all thank the BBC when we pay our £5000 licence fee that they kept us educated, not on Scottish History mind,
to vote correctly and not vote for Scotland but to vote for one nation…England..
and we can look up from our hovels now and again and see how well our kind
neighbours down South are doing and feel contented that we have served this
Union well and god bless the king and Westminster who are warm and rich and
it doesn’t matter that it is all from Scotlands wealth and natural resources because
we don’t know what to do with it after all the BBC told us we weren’t clever enough
and that big brother would give us our fair share…it’s such a green and pleasant land
now that Labour and Tories have joined together and become one party with the
Liberal Democrat’s getting honourary membership of the state party……One Britain….and to think that once us daft Scots actually had the audacity to think we
would have been better off away from the family…….when will we ever grow up!!!
Parcel…..Rogues…..Nation!!!
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Westminster spending £Billion on illegal wars, etc killing people. £125Billion a year funding NHS since 2015. Not increased. Spending £1090Billion but not enough monies for healthcare keeping people well.
Scottish Gov having to mitigate the cuts and low UK Gov pensions. Lowest in Europe. Impoverishing older people who use the NHS. Scottish Gov funding social care keeping people well and in better good health. Giving the healthcare workers the increase wages they need. Preventing strife and strikes.
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Lisa Summers this evening, paraphrase 7 or 8 percent vacancy rates for some consultants and physios. Highlighting the highest vacancies no doubt, so other posts will be less. Wonder what the equivalents are in Enlandshire ?
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Has this post been emailed to Dr Iain Kennedy and Sandesh Gulhane MP?
Would you even get a response?
Does anyone who works in the NHS in Scotland read Talking Up Scotland?
If so, would they like to comment?
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Giving Kennedys a bad name while sporting an Ancient Kennedy tie.
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