Murdo has said Health Minister Humza Yousaf has “lost focus” on his own job with Accident & Emergency (A & E) waiting times in Fife showing no sign of much improvement.
He was commenting following the release of the latest figures from Public Health Scotland which show that the percentage of patients seen within the four-hour SNP target waiting time at the A & E department at Victoria Hospital in Kirkcaldy was 64.4 in the week ending March 5. Although a slight improvement from the previous week – 58.8% in the week ending February 26 – the figure is still lower than the data for the week ending January 29, which was 66.9%.
Commenting, Murdo Fraser MSP said: “Over the last six weeks of the A & E waiting times of patients being seen within the SNP’s four-hour target are consistently poor. The latest figure is actually worse than six weeks ago, which is a damning indictment of Humza Yousaf’s poor handling of this very concerning situation.
“The figures for the whole of February in Fife show no sign of real improvement, which indicates that the Health Minister has lost focus on his actual job in the SNP Government.”
Murdo continued: “We regularly hear of poor waiting time figures for patients in Fife and across Scotland at A & E departments, which is shocking to be honest. These are patients who may well be in agony having possibly broken a bone or fallen on the ground. The four-hour target stipulates that 95% of patients attending A & E should be seen, treated and subsequently discharged or admitted to hospital but the figures for NHS Fife are nowhere near that.”
“I find it very concerning that there has been no real improvement in the waiting times for A & E patients in Fife – this is not good enough. The Health Minister has been warned about this issue many times but he does not seem to know how to rectify the problem. During the SNP leadership debates he has desperately tried to convey the image that the health service is in good shape under his watch when the entire opposite is true.
“I wasn’t surprised to read a YouGov poll earlier this week which showed that 40% of respondents felt Humza Yousaf would be an incompetent First Minister if chosen, with 42% saying he was untrustworthy. His record as a Health Minister is actually embarrassing.”
