Murdo Fraser MSP has expressed his concerns at ambulance statistics that show that some critically ill patients in Tayside had to wait over 15 minutes for an ambulance to take them to hospital.
This follows the release of the latest data from the Scottish Ambulance Service for the week beginning April 28, which shows that each health board in Scotland that reported their 90th percentile ambulance response times for purple category incidents exceeded the eight-minute target response time. In Tayside, this response time was 00:16:44.
A purple category incident (code red response time) indicates when a patient is deemed to have a high likelihood (10% or more) of experiencing a cardiac arrest. These are the most critically ill patients requiring immediate and highly skilled care.
Commenting, Mr Fraser said: “I am very concerned by these figures which show that patients in Tayside who, in some cases, will be fighting for their lives, have to wait more than 15 minutes to get an ambulance when they are in a dire situation. It is utterly scandalous that we see this scenario replicated across every Scottish health board.
“Once again, this shows how the SNP Government are letting patients down and not focussing on the job in hand. In his Programme for Government this week, the First Minister made various promises to create 100,000 new GP appointments but this was immediately slammed by Dr Iain Morrison, chairman of the Scottish General Practice at the British Medical Association, who said ‘it will not solve’ the access issues in people having to phone at 8am to try to get a GP appointment.
“Instead, we found that public money will continue to be used on the SNP’s obsession with independence in the run-up to next year’s Holyrood election.”
Mr Fraser continued: “Dedicated frontline staff in our NHS are working tirelessly to keep patients safe, but they are being failed by this SNP Government.”
