Professor John Robertson OBA

BBC Scotland’s top stories today, on their website and on their broadcast news, but there’s something missing. This, from the Scottish Government only yesterday afternoon:

New figures show NHS waiting lists have fallen and waits of more than a year have reduced for the fourth month in a row.

When compared with August 2025, September saw a 7.3% decrease in new outpatient waits longer than a year – this number has now fallen for four consecutive months. The total waiting list for outpatients has decreased by 2.0% on the same month last year, and the inpatient and daycase waiting list has fallen by 0.2% over the same period.

Treatment Time Guarantee waits of over a year have decreased by 5.9% when compared to last month. These waits have been dropping since February 2025 and are now lower than at the same point last year. Reductions are seen under both 2012 and 2023 waiting times guidance.

The latest figures show that activity has increased, with the number of new outpatient attendances for September increasing by 10,136 (9.5%) to 116,776 attendances when compared with August. There has also been an increase of more than 31,000 appointments and procedures from April to September compared to same period in 2024. https://www.gov.scot/news/reduction-in-nhs-waiting-lists/

So they’re not giving airtime to the plummeting homicides nor the falling waiting time lists. Imagine it was the opposite? They’d be upfront and linger for days.

Funnily enough they began to lose interest in Scottish waiting times as they began to fall below those of climbing English ones. See:

NHS waiting list in England is longer per head by quarter of a million patients and shockingly twice as long in Wales, than in Scotland

The homicides not news? Here:

Scotland’s homicide rate plummets by more than half in last 20 years, below Denmark and well below rUK, in wake of 18 years of reducing inequality, predicted by researchers but the story falls off BBC Scotland in only hours