to see patients quickly. In BBC 1’s 1pm report on ambulance waiting times the above important factor is mentioned. Regular readers may remember reading here that Scotland has a hospital bed for every 265 people whereas England only has one for every 413 and Scotland has 50% more nurses per patient than NHS England. That must make a difference but not one to be reported by BBC Scotland. Sources: https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-19-00620/ Continue reading NHS Scotland’s greater supply of beds and nurses make the ambulance ‘crisis’ less serious

When BBC Scotland report health waiting times, they rarely if ever, offer comparative data from the other 3 nations in the UK. Scotland has, of course, the best results in the UK. When BBC England reported on ambulance waiting times, they were careful to add: In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the 999 system is also under “tremendous pressure”, doctors say. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-61335711 Oh, so things are equally bad everywhere suggesting that the UK Government is doing as well as the others? The report makes no attempt to compare like-for-like data. They rely on: BBC News has spoken to patients in … Continue reading BBC England obscures ambulance ‘crisis’

From SNP Media today: Scotland is a safer place under the SNP with crime down 40% since 2006/2007 and at one of the lowest levels since records began in 1974. Figures from the Scottish Crime and Justice Survey also show that just 11.9% of people experienced crime in 2019/20, compared with 20.4% in 2008/09. It is also lower than the equivalent figures in England and Wales of 13.3%. Despite cuts from its central budget from Westminster, the SNP Scottish Government has protected Scotland’s police officers with around 32 officers per 10,000 population in Scotland compared to around 23 in England and … Continue reading Scotland is a safer place since the SNP took over

In the Herald today from William Loneskie of Lauder: The Labour Party was founded on the principle that working people of all countries have more in common than divides them. The problems of workers in Glasgow are exactly those of workers in Leeds. Mr Stenton claims that Scots think differently from English. Rubbish. We speak the same international language, obey the same laws, do the same type of work, worry about the cost of living crisis in equal measure, watch the same television, take the same type of holidays, and so on. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/20128857.letters-end-myth-scots-think-differently-english/ Loneskie is a regular in the media posting conservative … Continue reading Do Scots think differently from the English?

Without presenting any actual statistics, BBC Scotland staff groomed staff in Edinburgh to tell us, out of context, how bad things are. Straight comparisons are slightly problematic but still possible. In March 2022 (the latest) NHS England ambulances for Category 1 cases had a mean response time of 9 minutes and 35 seconds while for NHS Scotland the equivalent category (purple), the median was 7 minutes and 4 seconds. Why use median instead of mean? It’s best to use the mean when the distribution of the data values is symmetrical and there are no clear outliers. It’s best to use … Continue reading Scottish ambulance response times compare well with NHS England

By stewartb: Published today (10 May) are the latest performance data for A&E waiting times in NHS Scotland. Nothing appearing (yet!) on the BBC News website – no headline, no article. I wonder why? In the week ending 1 May, 2022 compliance with the 4 hour waiting time target improved to 71.6%. This is the best performance in the past c.3 months and follows steady improvement across recent weeks. Notably, NHS Tayside which had 1,597 ‘attendances’ in the week attained a 92% performance against the 4 hour target. (Still puzzled why health journalists and opposition politicians don’t press the obvious … Continue reading Has BBC Scotland’s Lisa Summers missed the emergency waiting times improvement?

As the opposition parties and our MSM feast on unsubstantiated scare stories about the QEUH, it’s worth looking at real evidence of how well it is doing. No Scottish hospital has a higher than expected mortality rate and QEUH has one of the lower scores in Scotland, at 4.7% compared to the average of 4.95%. In England, 11 trusts had higher than predicted mortality with, for example, Norfolk and Norwich having 505 more deaths than the 2 600 predicted. QEUH had nearly 300 fewer deaths than the 3 225 predicted. Readers may remember that NHS Scotland has nearly twice as … Continue reading Glasgow super hospital safer than the average

By stewartb The New Economics Foundation (NEF) published in January 2022 a research report entitled: ‘CLOSING THE DIVIDE: HOW TO REALLY LEVEL UP THE UK’. In many respects from a Scotland perspective it’s a disappointing piece of work: notwithstanding its title, much of the content only refers to the English regions. However, there is one chart in the NEF report (Figure 1) that does includes information on Scotland – and it’s interesting! It shows the extent to which the gap in disposable incomes – between highest and lowest halves of the UK’s income distribution – has changed since 2019: On … Continue reading Gap in incomes in Scotland narrower than other UK nations and regions

Fed by the Lib Dem’s Liam McArthur, the Herald repeats his exaggerated response to the news that there is no ‘confirmed timetable for the consultation process’ into a Scottish equivalent for a scheme which need not launch until 2025, after the 2nd independence referendum and possible re-entry of Scotland into the EU, with a consequent return to Erasmus funding. At the Spending Review 2021, the UK Government confirmed funding for the Turing Scheme for the next three years, including maintaining total funding for mobilities and delivery of the scheme at £110 million for the 2022/23 Academic Year.  https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmscotaf/1252/report.html Continue reading Erasmus to run until 2024 so…

375 000 times by water companies last year! BBC 1 at 1pm today announced the above shocking figure. In Scotland, according to the Ferret and the National there were 12 725 incidents in the same year. How does that compare? Well, do we do the usual 10 times the population thing or take account of Scotland’s area or quantity of water supply? On that basis, per head of population, England’s water companies are discharging sewage more than three times as often. In terms of area England is less than twice as big at 130 000 sq km to 78 000, … Continue reading Is England polluting its rivers and lakes with raw sewage up to 300 times more intensively?