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By stewartb

There is so much more that could be written about the Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s (RCEM) statement on long waits in NHS Scotland’s emergency departments and their impact, and on the mainstream media’s coverage of this.

And then there is the MSM’s amplification – without any critical appraisal – of quotes from the Tory Sandesh Gulhane and Labour’s Jackie Baillie.

From the BBC News website, the Independent online and no doubt other news outlets today (September 23) we read:

From Gulhane: ‘‘Scottish Tory health spokesman Dr Sandesh Gulhane said government ministers should “hang their heads in shame”. “These completely avoidable deaths are the direct result of the nationalists’ abject failure to meet their own A&E targets,” he said. “Frontline staff are working flat out for their patients, but they’ve been failed by successive SNP health secretaries who still haven’t come up with a credible plan to address this national emergency.”

The waiting times performance data of emergency departments in England when the Tories governing in Westminster were responsible, are readily for inspection. They show a substantially poorer performance by NHS England over years than that of NHS Scotland!

Baillie: ‘the “damning analysis lays bare the true cost of SNP failure”and “For years Scots have been dying as a result of dangerously long waits in A&E, but the SNP has stood idly by while this crisis ran riot” and “The SNP has no idea how to fix this crisis and our NHS cannot afford a third decade of this incompetence.”

The waiting times performance data of emergency departments in Wales where Labour have long been the responsible government are readily available for inspection. They show a substantially poorer performance by NHS Wales over years than that of NHS Scotland!

Candidly, the mainstream media is complicit in enabling Tory and Labour hypocrisy.

There are real challenges facing the NHS and its A&E performance across the UK. The mainstream media are only too keen – as arguably is the RCEM too – to highlight the performance of NHS Scotland but without context and without perspective that would reveal its relatively MUCH better performance than its peers in England, Wales and NI.

The mild response of the Scottish Government – the complete absence of a response from NHS Scotland health boards – to all this negative coverage about A&E services targeted on Scotland is to say the least, inadequate. The SNP leadership must surely realise that Labour and others will seek to exploit the NHS in the 2026 election campaign, with news media’s support. It (somehow) needs to get on the front foot to counter the dominant, negative framing.