THE Scottish Tories have refused to say that there is a “crisis” in the NHS in England – despite using the term to describe the situation facing Scotland’s health service.
The party instead said that the NHS was facing “huge challenges” across the UK.
The line from Douglas Ross’s Scottish contingent echoes the refusal from the UK Government to accept there is a crisis in England’s health service.
Instead, Rishi Sunak’s official spokesperson has insisted that the “challenges” facing the NHS are primarily a result of the pandemic and that the funding needed to see it through the winter has already been provided.
However, the Scottish Tories have had no such compunction about labelling the pressures facing the NHS in Scotland a “crisis”.
“The Scottish Government have been warned for months about the critical situation in our NHS and have done nothing to avert this crisis,” Ross wrote on Twitter.
Asked by The National if the Scottish Tories would agree that Ross’s description of an NHS in crisis was also true for England, a spokesperson for the party declined to say that it did.
Instead, the spokesperson said: “Nobody would deny our NHS services across the United Kingdom are facing huge challenges.
“What is undeniable though is that the buck for the crisis in Scotland stops with Humza Yousaf and the SNP where the health service is the full responsibility of the Scottish Government.
“Suffering patients and burnt out staff across Scotland have completely lost faith in Humza Yousaf’s ability to turn things around. He is no longer a part of the solution and must be sacked by Nicola Sturgeon.”
The UK Government has come under heavy fire from medics for its denial of a crisis in the English NHS.
Dr Vishal Sharma, the chair of the consultants committee at the British Medical Association, told The Guardian that blaming the pandemic for the NHS crisis and not “more than a decade of political choices to reduce investment in the NHS and its workforce is little more than an attempt to rewrite history”.
Sharma went on: “For staff working in the NHS or any patients desperately trying to access care, No 10’s refusal to admit that the NHS is in crisis will seem simply delusional. To try to reassure us that ministers are confident the NHS has all the funding it needs, at a time when families are seeing relatives left in pain at home or on trolleys in hospital, is taking the public for fools.”
TV presenter Dr Hilary Jones also publicly attacked the Prime Minister over his denial of a crisis.
Speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, he said: “For Rishi Sunak and the Government to pretend that this is not a crisis when more than a dozen trusts have announced critical incidents is not only delusional, as the BMA say, I would say at the very best it’s ill-informed misjudgment, at the very worst it’s total irresponsibility and incompetence. I have never known anything like this.”
Hilary went on: “What is he going to do about this? If this isn’t a crisis, what is?
“I’ve never known the NHS in such a bad situation. And if it doesn’t change very quickly, the NHS is finished. It’s not sustainable, it’s going to collapse.”
In Scotland, Health Secretary Yousaf has said that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to tackling the issues in Scotland’s NHS, adding: “Every option has to be on the table rightly as oncologists are saying.
“I met with the Royal College of Emergency Medicine just this [Wednesday] morning so every single option nationally is being considered because of the scale of the pressure we’re under.”
