When he’s not falling off his scooter like he’s auditioning for the role of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther franchise, the gaffe-prone Scottish health minister, Humza Yousaf, is mired in a multitude of Scottish NHS crises.
This month saw Britain’s armed forces parachuted in to prop up the Scottish Ambulance Service. Nicola Sturgeon was forced to call on the military after distressed patients had to wait hours, and sometimes even days, for an ambulance – one of the most harrowing cases involved a frail Glasgow pensioner who died after waiting 40 hours for an ambulance to arrive.
Dig into the government statistics and the scale of the crisis facing the Scottish NHS is clear. At the end of June over 115,000 Scottish patients were waiting to be seen for the government’s eight ‘key’ diagnostics tests (such as CT scans, MRI scans and endoscopies) an increase of 9 per cent from the end of March, and 17 per cent higher than at the end of June 2020.
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