Professor John Robertson OBA
Tucked away on the BBC Health website today, with a small presence and a euphemistic headline, on BBC UK but nowhere else other than in the Guardian, which has the more accusatory headline I’ve quoted above.
The BBC Health report makes no mention of the health secretary at the time of these events in early 2024. Even an out-of-government UK party gets no blame. Does the BBC fear their return at some time in the future?
The deaths? Just this, in the 3rd paragraph:
About 10 people are thought to have since died, but it is not clear whether any screening could have prevented those deaths.
I mean, really, imagine this had happened in Scotland?
In the text, the Guardian too is less accusatory than in its headline and does not mention any politician.
But in Scotland:
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
O/T BBC News website (on March 11) had this headline on its Wales page: ‘Ambulance targets overhaul to ‘save more lives’.
The BBC reports: ‘… the change comes against the backdrop of deteriorating performance since response times targets were last overhauled in 2015 – when a range of targets were replaced by a single target for the most urgent red calls.’
‘Many delays experienced by the ambulance service are beyond its control and occur as a result of ambulances queuing outside hospital A&E departments, with more than four times as many hours lost in this way in the past twelve months, compared with 2017. In January this year alone, about 27,000 hours were “lost” while ambulances and crews were stuck outside A&E waiting to hand their patients over.’ (my emphasis)
When it decided on a course of action, I presume the Labour-led Welsh Government hadn’t realised that everything in the NHS in Scotland is actually crap – according to its fellow Labour Party members in Holyrood. The BBC tells us:: ‘According to the Welsh government, the changes are in response to a recommendation by the cross-party Senedd health committee which concluded current targets were no longer fit for purpose. It said the new approach mirrored those already used in Ireland, Scotland and Australia where survival rates have improved.’
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