Unpopular Nicola Sturgeon puts in her pal to be Health Sec, Shona Robison, the ‘Eddie the Eagle’ of Health oversees a massive crisis in health of patients of being failed, rather than fix the problem, SNP lower the bar on health targets, inept, unethical and unprincipled, lacking substance and integrity, the modern SNP

Dear All

There is a massive crisis in the Scottish National Health Service, an organisation which is totally devolved to Holyrood.

And run by the increasingly inept Scottish National Party Government of formerly Alex Salmond and now Nicola Sturgeon.

Of course you don’t fully realise how bad things are unless you are caught up in it, which happened to me in December.

At present, the current SNP mantra is to blame Westminster but in this case the Nationalists are fully responsible for the entire mess, 7 years in government should have seen progress year in and year out.

More than 4,000 patients spent over eight hours waiting to be seen in Scotland’s over-stretched A&E departments.

Personal stories always add weight to a post, so here is what happened to me and as I read some others. I visited A&E at the Southern General because I was in such incredible pain I thought I was going to die.

My internal organs were shutting down. So, I go in and are seen by a triage nurse who I explained in great detail my symptoms, he never physically examined me but hands myself a leaflet how A&E is for accident and emergencies.

Call me old fashioned but I thought internal organs shutting down ticked the box as an “emergency”.

I am then seen by a doctor who also gives me the same lecture about how A&E is for accidents, people with heart attacks or who had their leg blown off. He didn’t physically examine me either. But he did tell me that the Urine sample the nurse took contained blood. That was my kidneys packing up because they couldn’t get rid of the toxic waste the body produces.

Told to go see my doctor, and left after receiving no medical treatment whatsoever or a physical examination by either qualified medical staff!

I spent an additional circa 55 hours in sheer agony before I got seen by my GP. I explained the exact same symptoms to him and he examined me, within less than a minute, he finished and told me I had to get back to the Southern General immediately.

He wrote me a letter after attempting to get through to the hospital on the phone. Within 10 minutes of handing the letter to hospital staff, I was rushed in for treatment past many others in the waiting area. I was then told I couldn’t leave the hospital as I was being emergency admitted to a ward. If I hadn’t got an appointment with my GP on the Friday, I would have had to have waited 6 days before he could see me, during that time, I could have suffered complete renal shutdown and died.

In 2007, Scotland’s ‘jolly fat man’ Alex Salmond put unpopular Nicola Sturgeon in charge of the Health service by making her the Health Minister. People were told the NHS was an SNP flagship policy and ‘safe’ in their hands.

Another Nationalist lie!

My tale is first hand experience but as I was to discover in the press, other people were getting turned away from A&E during this period. Clearly measures should have been put in place that a physical examination of a patient should have been carried out.

The SNP Government or to put the blame squarely were it belongs; Nicola Sturgeon failed to protect seriously ill Scots. Either asleep at the wheel, awol, serially incompetent or like the other SNP clowns like MacAskill or Russell incapable of leadership. Scotland’s NHS has suffered under the SNP as they are more interested in spinning failure as success and covering the cracks, to make Nicola Sturgeon look good. Apparently Sturgeon was supposed to be never out of the hospitals; one could ask what she was doing with her time.   

After unpopular Nicola Sturgeon became First Minister, she like Alex Salmond put her ‘pal’ Shona Robison in as Health Minister, and as we are seeing Robison is continuing the proud tradition of incompetence displayed by Sturgeon.

We now know the Scottish NHS is worse then down in England as they failed to meet the SNP’s “world leading” target treatment times.

Like a fat pole vaulter she is lowering the bar to be a success, why bother having targets when the SNP clearly are unable to meet them.

Do you remember the slogan that ‘decisions about Scotland are best made by people who live in Scotland’, with the by-line because they care more. Like most of what is uttered by Nicola Sturgeon that was vacuous pish. Health, education and Justice, all high profile departments have been mismanaged by the SNP.     

Official figures show that nearly 10% of patients were not seen within four hours between October and December last year. Doctors and opposition politicians have expressed dismay at the figures, which are worse than England. However, not being able to find a suitable narrative to blame the English by the Nationalists, has lead Shona Robison, the Health Minister to claim the winter had seen hospitals face "unprecedented pressures”.

What would have happened if the SNP had won independence and opened the immigration floodgates, remember they wanted to increase the population of Scotland by a million people!

I was seen under four hours time limit but I didn’t get any medical treatment that was to come about 55hrs later from my initial visit. Apparently a staff member remembered me from my first visit and being kicked out as a ‘timewaster’ by saying, ‘you back again’.

Having failed to meet the treatment time target, the SNP Government have decided lower the target so they can claim they are being successful, from 98% to 95%. Yet again, the sheer contempt for Scottish people is exposed as Shona Robison fails to take responsibility for the failure by moving the goalposts.

Jim Murphy, the Scottish Labour leader, claimed the figures exposed “the crisis in our NHS under the SNP", adding:

“Patients across Scotland are told regularly by SNP ministers that they should be grateful things are not as bad as in England. Now we know that under the SNP, things are even worse in Scotland. That's just not good enough and Scotland deserves better.”

Murphy is right; we do deserve better but the SNP is run as a clique in whom their leaders are more interested in giving their ‘pals’ ministerial positions with the large salary and perks than getting the right people to manage it under the guise of being ‘talented’.

Theresa Fyffe, Scotland director of the Royal College of Nursing, said it was not fair for standards in patient care to suffer because “the right staff and resources are not in place”.

The current Sturgeon mantra of its time to ‘let the women take charge’ because they will make things ‘better’ is obviously a complete farce.

That insults the intelligence not just of the male but also female population of Scotland.

At times like this, I think back to what the women of Govan said about Nicola Sturgeon during the Govan by-election:

“Arsehole”!

Yours sincerely

George Laird

The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University