| | | Neil McIntosh | | Editor of The Scotsman |
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Hello Voornaam, Occasionally we wonder: are we banging on too much about a particular story? After all, we don't want to give a particular issue undue prominence, or bore people. This week, when it has come to the performance of Scotland's NHS, that question has been relatively easy to answer. After all, few things matter more than the health of the country. And healthcare provision in this country is not going well. On Saturday, we reported on £160m in payouts for botched operations by NHS Scotland in the space of only four years, including the removal of a testicle without consent, gluing a patient's eye shut and failing to review the heart scan of a patient suffering a heart attack. On Tuesday, health correspondent Joseph Anderson reported on the desperate staffing crisis in Scotland's NHS, with GPs under huge pressure, patients being ignored by hospitals because the staff are overworked, and carers being asked to take blood samples. On Wednesday, Joseph's analysis revealed that Humza Yousaf had failed in his promise to "eradicate" one-year waits for treatment on the NHS, with more than 31,000 outpatients in Scotland still waiting to see a nurse or a doctor. As we pointed out in a leader that day, many people we speak to are scraping together the money for private care for their ailments, fearful they'll simply never get sorted out on the NHS. When enough people start thinking that way, the NHS - or at least the service we understand it to be - will die. On Thursday, some further digging by Joseph revealed there is now a huge gulf between Scotland and England when it comes to waiting times. Despite England having 10 times the population of Scotland, far fewer people are waiting more than two years for treatment. On March 31, 7,849 people were in that boat in Scotland. In England, only 599 were. And, today, we reported the inevitable: people are dying because of this. More than 18,000 in the last year, with - as we'd talked about earlier in the week - official figures showing soaring use of private healthcare by some. As Joseph wrote, the Scottish Government can no longer indulge in whataboutery on the state of Scotland's NHS. Not everything is life and death, but the state of our NHS certainly is. We'll keep our focus on Scotland's health, not least because - of course - all of us who live here are likely to end up relying on it at some point in our lives. Few things matter more. Best wishes, Neil McIntosh Editor, The Scotsman | 