Scotland’s NHS health crisis is laid bare, 1,000 operations cancelled since January, how much longer can unpopular Nicola Sturgeon’s serial incompetence be tolerated, Scots deserve better but Nationalists ran a con trick on them telling them NHS was safe in their hands, it isn't!

Dear All

Years ago in my youth, a band called UB40 had a song called, ‘I am the one in ten’; it was a very catchy hit at the time to highlight the problem of unemployment in Britain.

Fast forward 30 years later and we could have a new song, ‘I am the one in thirty’.

Almost 30 patients every day are having their operations cancelled in the Scottish National Health Service.

Incidentally, ‘I am the one in thirty’, because I am seriously ill at present I was booked into a Glasgow Hospital for a procedure, the morning of appointment, I was phoned up and it was cancelled. Due to some good fortune, I was found a spot the next day, I don’t know if this was down to a cancellation or not, anyway I had to travel to another hospital. That said, despite being worried caused by uncertainty, the staff I met next day were great, I turned up on time and found myself having to wait beyond the time of my appointment, but you can live with that.

The SNP Government are responsible for the National Health Service in Scotland, unable to blame Westminster, Nicola Sturgeon’s pal, Shona Robison has decided to blame patients.

Apparently they should have arranged not to get sick over the winter period!

The hallmark of this Sturgeon led SNP Government is cronyism, stupidity and incompetence, it is the same management model run under Scotland’s ‘jolly fat man’ Alex Salmond.

When winter comes, it bring challenges, but whether it winter, summer, autumn or spring, the SNP leadership should have done reform of the Government, in plain English, that means appointing deputy health secretaries to ensure the workload is dealt with.

Apparently this idea didn’t occur to Sturgeon or even Salmond because they wanted to show that they could run the country with less Ministers of State in a vain attempt to out do the Scottish Labour Party. Well the results are in, and the verdict is that the SNP who run the Scottish Government as some part time concern, it’s a shambles. From 2012 to date, the SNP have allowed this country to drift, nothing gets done of any real meaning and responsibility is evaded and pushed onto someone else at the earliest opportunity.

Do you remember the ridiculous nonsense by the SNP that decisions about Scotland are best taken by people in Scotland, as if living here somehow empowers people with a special foresight!

We have had three SNP Health Ministers, Nicola Sturgeon arsed the entire service up, reforms dropped in favour of chasing indy, Alex Neil who was out of his depth and couldn’t stand the sight of blood, and then comes Shona Robison who hadn’t any claim to fame other than being Sturgeon’s pal. Her appointment as Health Sec is farce, all Sturgeon is doing is keeping Dundee SNP on side, Robison’s husband is SNP Deputy Leader Stewart Hosie.

You can catch him online getting ripped a new arse by Andrew Neil of the BBC. Hosie expresses his ‘outrage’ that the Tory Government had borrowed £75 billion, we should remember, his new boss wants more than double that at £180 billion. When asked how this should be paid for, Hosie had no idea. You can find that exchange on twitter, and click on the youtube link, a classic case of being ill prepared and spouting rhetoric that is meaningless.

Back to his wife who is struggling to cope, not with the winter demand in health but with generating enough electricity to power her brain cells as the concept of reform is just mentally out of reach. Since the turn of the year, nearly one thousand pre-planned operations have been put off at short notice. You would think illness rising during winter was some type of new phenomena which has just arrived on Planet Earth much like snow falling on the roads requires gritting.

You could describe it as the ‘how was I to know’ syndrome.

The NHS was desperately short of beds, during my recent stay in hospital, people who were classed as medicine patients were put in my ward as the wards were filling up and they needed to be placed somewhere. Leading surgeons to say "radical change" may be needed to address underlying issues in the way healthcare is delivered.

Gosh, did they just say ‘radical’?

Well if the situation requires ‘radical thinking’ then they are shit out of luck with Sturgeon’s Government.

Scottish Conservative MSP and health spokesman Jackson Carlaw said that hundreds of people would have suffered a massive inconvenience and in some cases their health and wellbeing would have been hit.

My health took a real hammering trying to get treated as A&E where turning genuine cases like me away as they sought to clear out some people as ‘timewasters’, so I speak from personal experience. Apparently nearly dying of renal failure and other complications isn’t that serious, despite being classed as a case for emergency medical treatment.

Jackson Carlaw added:

"Everyone appreciates winter brings greater challenges for the NHS than any other time of year, but these statistics are eye-watering. When winter bites it's understandable some procedures will be cancelled - but the scale of this shows how wide of the mark the SNP planning for this was."

Health boards blamed the surge in patient numbers with urgent conditions for the situation, adding other people had delayed discharges, which see patients stuck in hospital. It is also cited there is a lack of care home places or support packages provided by councils, as a key factor behind the shortage of available beds.

Maybe the idea by the SNP Government of not allowing councils to alter council tax bills wasn’t a good idea after all. But then the SNP buying the election using public funds won’t work out.

Ian Ritchie, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, said that while the issue of cancelling elective operations was important, it was a symptom of a wider problem in the NHS.

The Scottish NHS is now worse than the system currently being operated in England, so this is evidence that the SNP cannot manage and also evidence that that decisions about Scotland aren’t always best taken by people in Scotland.

Especially if Nicola Sturgeon has any involvement in it!

Yours sincerely

George Laird

The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University